


Toska

by cytheriafalas



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fix-It, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 17:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2780885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cytheriafalas/pseuds/cytheriafalas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I've been working on this off-and-on since the second Cap movie was in the theaters. Steve tracks Bucky to Ukraine, determined to bring him home physically and mentally. Includes meddling Avengers, Fury as head of SHIELD, and damaged!Bucky. Written before Agents of SHIELD premiered, so it doesn't take into account much about the show. Completed, will be posted Mondays and Thursdays. Follow me at fangirlingtendencies on tumblr to keep track of new updates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hey Brother

**Author's Note:**

> Written with [this playlist](http://open.spotify.com/user/129150009/playlist/1ewF2sYM7mD9b9RoMYplsA) in mind. I recommend giving it a listen while you read. Or just in general, 'cause I think it's a pretty awesome playlist.

Six months. It had been six full months of constant searching, hunting down leads that went nowhere. Sleepless nights pushing even his body to the extreme limit, chartering illegal flights into countries that had forbidden his presence. He parachuted into Bolivia, crossed mountains into Kyrgyzstan, spent a week in Botswana, and a whole month in the Australian bush. One city blurred into another until Natasha coerced Banner and Stark into “convincing” Steve to take a break.

He agreed to take a month off only because the Avengers would otherwise put their considerable talents and resources into locking him up for that same month. This way he at least had the freedom to move around the city.

The break came just at the end of his lockdown. Natasha showed him a blurry, grainy satellite feed of a man stumbling down a street of Serbian bars. The picture was so bad Steve could hardly see that the shape was a man, but the long glint of silver from shoulder to hand told him enough. He left that night.

Four months later he found himself a few miles off Lake Synevir in Ukraine. The trail had run cold weeks ago, and if Steve didn’t find anything here, he would have to go back home and hope Natasha or the newly-rebuilt SHIELD had something for him.

Steve knelt at a stream and splashed water on his face. He was tired. More exhausted than he had been at the height of the war. After almost a year of searching, he still had nothing. No Bucky, no idea where Bucky might have been, no sign that he was even okay. It wasn’t good enough. If he’d been a little faster, a little stronger, a little more capable, then none of this would have happened. Bucky wouldn’t have fallen. Steve wouldn’t have needed to crash that plane into the ocean.

A branch crunched behind him and Steve spun, hand going for the shield he kept wrapped in a dirty rag at his back. He saw a flash of dark hair and a glint of silver, but it was enough. Bucky — it had to be Bucky — ran, and Steve ran after him. He was too tired to keep up the chase for long, but after no more than a quarter of a mile, the shape in front of him darted to one side. Steve followed and broke through into a clearing. He stopped, a stream a few feet across the only thing between the two of them. Bucky stood with his back to Steve, hands pressed against a tree trunk.

“I don’t know you,” Bucky said, the words tearing from his mouth. “I don’t know you!”

Steve had only the warning of metal fingers tightening on a branch before it flew at him. He ducked, braced himself for more projectiles or even Bucky himself, but nothing else came. He straightened and took a slow, careful step forward.

Bucky’s black leather vest was torn and almost rotting. His pants had been so often stained that they were no longer even black, but a grimy brown-gray. He had no guns that Steve could see, only a few knives that stayed in their sheaths. Bucky’s hair was longer than it was the last time Steve had seen him, when he’d been crazed with rage and Steve could almost believe that it wasn’t his friend staring at him. His shoes were worn, cracks forming in the leather. Only the metal arm was clean and bright, the red star the only spot of color on him.

Steve hadn’t thought about what to say when he found Bucky. He’d been sure the words would come to him, or that Bucky would be standing there the way he always was, the smirk and the swagger and he would make some comment about Steve having gotten lost on the way to rescue him.

“I don’t know you!” Bucky snarled for the third time, pounding his fist against the tree. It was the sound of an animal in pain, barely intelligible, but so filled with agony that something in Steve ached to take it away.

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes,” Steve began. “You were born—”

“ _Shut up_!” Bucky finally turned around and launched himself at Steve.

The punches hurt, but Steve blocked most of them, spinning Bucky around and wrapping his arms around his friend’s chest, pinning his arms to his sides. He used the few extra inches he had on Bucky to lift him, hauling him toward the stream in the clearing. Half a dozen steps in, Steve dumped Bucky in the water, only to find Bucky’s feet tangled with his, bringing him down hard. The water was only a few feet deep, but shockingly cold. Steve lunged to his feet, expecting Bucky to come up fighting, but he only sat up in the water, giving Steve a blank look.

“You need a bath,” Steve told him. It was true, although it wasn’t why he’d dumped Bucky in the water in the first place. He’d hoped the shock of the water would distract Bucky, hopefully even get him to stop fighting. It appeared to have worked.

He turned to the bag he had dropped when Bucky threw the branch at him and dug through it, aware that he was presenting an easy target to a man who had once been determined to beat him to death. He listened for the sound of Bucky’s movement, but there was nothing but the stream and Bucky’s ragged breath.

After a few moments of digging, he found what he had been looking for and turned around, holding out a set of clothes. The man stood, looking him over, and taking a single, slow step forward. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

Bucky began undoing snaps and shrugging his way out of wet leather that had rotted in some places to reveal the bright yellow kevlar beneath. Steve left him to it, wandering through the clearing. Now that he looked more closely, it looked as though it had seen recent and frequent use. The ground was trampled, grass flattened and weeds broken. There was a hollow in the dirt at the base of a tree, almost like a deer bed in the grass.

He rounded the tree and came upon the remnants of fires — a circle of blackened stones, charred branches, even a rudimentary spit. Something crunched beneath his feet, and when he looked down, Steve’s stomach clenched. Littered on the ground were dozens of tiny bones, some crunched and some almost whole.

Slow footsteps sounded behind him and Steve turned. The dip in the stream hadn’t done much for Bucky’s hair, except to make mud drip down his back, but he had changed into Steve’s clothes. They were too big on him, broad in the shoulders and long in the legs, but it was better than what he had been in.

“Have you been living here?” Steve asked. Bucky didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at Steve, but his body was rigid, too tense. “What have you been eating?”

A long, long pause. Steve was about to prod for another answer when Bucky’s shoulders rose and fell in a harsh breath.

“Whatever I can get.” He shrugged, a jagged motion. “Sometimes people leave things at the lake. Sometimes fish, rabbits.” His eyes flicked toward where Steve stood. “Sometimes mice.”

On reflex, because Bucky would have let him, Steve reached to touch Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky blocked him as though Steve had thrown a punch. Steve stepped back, hands raised to show he was unarmed. This wasn’t Bucky. Not yet. It was some mixture of Winter Soldier and Bucky Barnes who was still a stranger to him.

“Sorry,” Steve said, backing up a step further. “I forgot. You don’t know me.”

Steve crossed the clearing, careful to keep a wide berth between him and Bucky. The other man echoed his turn, body always parallel to Steve’s. He stopped at his pack, kneeling and unhooking a tin from the side of his pack. SHIELD may still have been in the process of rebuilding, but he still had access to the best of their technology. The tin was the size of his hand and maybe six inches thick. Natasha had apologized about the size and sworn SHIELD was working on getting it smaller.

With Bucky still watching from across the clearing, Steve knelt and set the box on the ground, pressing the button on its front. For a few seconds nothing happened but a soft _whirring_ sound and Steve worried that she’d mistaken the box she meant to give him for some high-tech sensory weapon, but eventually the lid split open and a camouflaged tent began to emerge.

Bucky made a sharp sound that if Steve hadn’t known better would have been fear. By the time Steve picked up his pack, the tent was fully set up and large enough for three people. He unzipped the tent flap, kicked off his shoes, and ducked inside.

Steve left the tent flap unzipped even when the rain started sprinkling outside. Some part of him hoped Bucky would sense the warmth, the overabundance of blankets. Even the bottom of the tent was padded, enough to cut the hard soil into something tolerable. But aside from the shadow of his form walking outside, Bucky never appeared.

Awoken some time during the night by a crash of thunder that sounded too much like the crash of a burning helicarrier, Steve stuck his head outside. Bucky was curled up in a ball in the depression at the base of the tree, uncovered, shivering. As much as he wanted to bring Bucky a blanket, or bring him inside the tent, he knew the overture would be unwelcome. Disgusted with himself, Steve turned back into the tent and forced himself to fall back asleep.

Steve woke with the sun that morning and emerged to find Bucky already gone. He refused to worry, refused to consider that Bucky had run and that Steve had to chase him again. He dressed and went looking for water to wash.

Less than a quarter mile away, the stream led to a larger river, deep enough for Steve to wash with relative ease and, he was especially pleased to note, one that teemed with fish. He caught three trout and a crab and had them crackling over a fire by midmorning.

Bucky reappeared just as Steve put the food onto two tin plates. Say what you would about SHIELD technology, some part of Steve still felt more comfortable with basic gear. The kind of stuff that didn’t come with Tony’s disclaimer of “Well, it probably won’t explode.”

Steve wouldn’t exactly have called Bucky _chatty_ yesterday, but compared to today, that’s definitely what he had been. He skirted the edge of the clearing, shoulders hunched but back straight. He’d washed sometime while he was gone, his hair damp and most of it tied out of his face, although the front strands had already escaped its bonds. He never took his eyes off Steve, but it wasn’t the causal gaze of a friend or the interest of a stranger. He seemed to look through Steve, always conscious of where he was, what he was doing, but never coming close to acknowledging his presence. It was chilling.

“I made some food,” Steve said, offering the second plate. Bucky didn’t move. Steve walked it half way to the other man and set it on the ground, walking back to the fire. He leaned against a fallen log and stretched his legs out in front of him.

“I never got to thank you for saving my life. Maria — Agent Hill — said it must have been you who pulled me out. There weren’t any other agents in the area. Well,” he amended, shrugging and staring at the fire, “she said she couldn’t believe I’d pulled myself out with that stomach wound.” Steve pressed his hand to the scar. With his healing abilities, it already looked old, but he felt the pull of the skin like it was new. “I told her it had to have been you, and she agreed with me. She might have been being sarcastic; I can never tell with her. You know how I am with women.”

Bucky’s only reaction was to inch closer to the plate. His eyes flicked between Steve and the food as though expecting some kind of trap. Steve snagged his own plate and tore off a piece with his fingers, chewing it slowly.

“I’m not a very good cook,” Steve said, looking back at the fire. Bucky seemed only to move when Steve wasn’t watching. He could work with that. “Banner tried to teach me once. Bruce Banner, that is. He knows all sorts of things. Said it was something he’d tried to control his anger. Gave me up as useless after a few days. Thor wouldn’t even eat the roast I’d made, and that’s impressive.”

He heard the scrape of metal on metal and when he looked, Bucky had retreated back to the far side of the clearing. Bucky held the plate with his left arm so tightly that the tin had begun to buckle beneath his metal fingertips. He ate like a starving man, which he may well have been if he’d been living off mice and rabbits for the past few months.

“You’d like him, I think,” Steve said. “Thor, I mean. Well, and Banner. But Thor’s a god, Bucky. A real god. Well, he’s not _God_ , but the one they named Thursday after. Sometimes I think he’s crazy, but I think you’d get along real well.”

No response but the sound of Bucky cracking open the crab shell. Steve hid a small, satisfied smile behind another bite of fish.

“Do you remember when you took me to that restaurant when I was, what, fifteen? You found ten dollars on the ground. That’s when we found out I was allergic to seafood. Almost killed me, that one bite of shrimp I took.” Bucky’s head lifted, sharp like a deer sighting a wolf, then ducked back down to his food. “You carried me all the way to the hospital, stayed with me that night until they sent me home. I’m not allergic anymore, though. The serum cured even that. I tried some once after waking up here, but I didn’t like the taste. I guess almost dying sticks with a man.”

_Crack_ of shell and silence, so Steve talked. He talked, and talked, and talked. He told Bucky everything he’d learned since waking up, about SHIELD playing the Dodgers game they’d booth been at when he woke up, about the Dodgers moving to California, about YouTube and cat videos — “I don’t understand a lot of things about the way things are now, but Thor and Jane Foster were watching some video of a cat jumping into boxes and he showed me and somehow it was four hours later and nine of us were crowded around the computer, watching a different video of a cat jumping into boxes” — and everything but the Avengers and his time as the Capsicle. He talked about everything that mattered and nothing that _mattered_. He told Bucky everything he wanted his friend to know and nothing that burdened him.

He talked until his voice went hoarse and then kept talking. Sometimes Bucky would disappear into the forest and Steve kept talking like he was there. That night Steve left a blanket and pillow out when he retreated to the tent. He kept the flap unzipped that night, too.

The blanket and pillow were untouched and covered in fine dew the next morning, and Bucky was gone again. It became their routine. Steve would spend the morning foraging and hunting for their day’s food. After that, Steve would talk until his voice cracked and then they would sit in silence until night.

On the fifth night, Steve saw Bucky’s shadow backlit by the fire crossing near the tent. He crouched down by the blanket and pillow, and the next morning Steve found them folded near the hole Bucky had been sleeping in. And that morning, when Steve tried to wish Bucky good morning, no sound came from his mouth. He tried again and managed a sort of hissing sound.

Bucky looked at him, head tilted. Steve thought the confusion there was the first real expression he’d seen on Bucky’s face since the helicarrier. Steve cleared his throat. It didn’t help.

“Sorry,” he mouthed. “No stories today.” He wasn’t sure if the Winter Soldier could read lips because Bucky had been terrible at it, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if that had been part of his training.

Bucky disappeared for most of that morning, and when he came back, he was carrying a gutted dear in his metal hand. He set it on the ground in front of Steve and backed away. Those familiar blue-gray-green eyes locked with his for just a second, then they flicked away. It was something. A step down the right path. An offering and an acknowledgment.

Steve tried to talk a few times that day, but his voice barely responded. He gave up after the fourth try and spend the rest of the day focused on the deer. She had been a young doe, big enough to feed them easily for several days, but small enough that none of her should go to waste.

He was so absorbed in his task that he didn’t realize he was hearing anything at first. After he realized there were sounds, it took him even longer to realize they were words. His only excuse was that it wasn’t English or French or even German, the languages he was most familiar with. He looked up, searching for the origin of the sound, and found Bucky kneeling in the dirt, his left side angled slightly away.

Bucky’s hands were clasped on his knees, head bowed and dark hair falling over his face, eyes closed. His shoulders were hunched as though bracing for a blow. The only part of him that moved was his lips, whispering words that even Steve’s heightened hearing had to struggle to catch.

It had to be Russian. The rise and fall of the syllables seemed to match what he’d heard from Natasha on missions, although he’d never heard this much from her in one go. Steve kept himself busy preparing the deer, but he listened hard enough to pick up one line repeated again and again. He made a mental note to ask Natasha what it meant and committed the sounds to memory. _Ya ne pomnyu_.

It was Bucky’s voice that grew ragged as the day grew longer. Steve didn’t try to interrupt him when his voice sounded like sandpaper on stone. It was selfish of him, maybe, but it was more than he’d heard from Bucky in seventy years.

He cycled through phases where it sounded like half of a conversation, his voice rising and falling in degrees of desperation. Sometimes he shouted and then his fingers clenched, ripping the brown fabric of the pants Steve had given him. Once in a while he went very still, very quiet, and when he spoke Steve had to strain to hear him.

Bucky refused to eat. He didn’t even move when Steve approached him, although Steve stayed well out of arm’s reach. He didn’t want to risk spooking him or, if he was having flashbacks, triggering some sort of memory that he was better off without. Steve fell asleep that night to the sound of whispered Russian.

Steve’s voice was back the next day, although it sounded a little rougher than he was used to. When he emerged from the tent, the fire was already lit and Bucky was kneeling beside it. One of their bowls had been filled with fresh berries and he had picked up where Steve left off smoking the deer the previous day.

Bucky looked up when Steve stepped outside, stretching the night’s knots from his body. Their eyes met for a few seconds and although Steve saw none of Bucky in that steady gaze, it somehow seemed less empty. Then Bucky looked away, lifting a plate of venison jerky in Steve’s direction.

Steve accepted it gratefully. He was grateful more for the interaction, the most he’d gotten from Bucky since finding out his arrival, than for the food itself. He finished eating and when he came back from washing at the stream, Bucky was kneeling near the fire, hands on his knees.

The position sent a twinge through Steve’s stomach. It reminded him of some of the soldiers he’d seen when he’d first gotten overseas. He’d been waiting to meet with Colonel Phillips and had overheard the conversation he’d been having with another soldier, informing him that his brother had been confirmed killed in action. The man had responded by going straight to attention and not moving a single muscle until Phillips had dismissed him.

Bucky had that same sense, but instead of the pride Steve had always associated with standing at attention, this looked like submission. Steve had to bite back his desire to grab Bucky and pull him to his feet, shout at him to stand up, that he never needed to kneel. If he had his way, Bucky would never take a single order again. Ever.

Rage boiled up inside him. Rage that anyone could not only take his friend away from him, but that anyone dared to take Bucky from himself. It was a dangerous feeling, hot and unfamiliar. He didn’t often feel true anger and this threatened to swamp anything he’d ever felt before. Pure, blind rage that made his fists clench before he could think about what he was doing.

Steve forced himself to sit near the log he’d appropriated as his story-telling chair. Bucky didn’t move, even though they were closer than Bucky had allowed before. Steve took one calming breath and then another.

“We went to Coney Island one time,” Steve said, closing his eyes. He couldn’t stand to look at Bucky kneeling. “Well, we went to Coney Island a lot, but one time you made me ride a roller-coaster. I told you I hated roller-coasters, but you kept telling me it would be fun. I—”

“You got sick.”

Steve’s eyes snapped open. “What?”

Bucky’s head was turned toward him, but he was gazing somewhere beyond Steve. “You got sick,” Bucky repeated. “I—I don’t know… You got sick. And I… felt… bad.” He said ‘felt bad’ as though he was repeating something in a foreign language. His eyes focused on Steve, the razor-sharp gaze that was more Winter Soldier than Bucky Barnes. “You were smaller, then.”

Steve felt a warm rush of relief. Maybe he remembered. Maybe he just needed time. “I was, yeah. What else do you remember?”

Silence. Slowly, Bucky’s eyes unfocused and he looked back down at his knees. The lines of tension that had appeared in his form when he’d spoken faded from his body and he looked relaxed.

_Deep breaths_. It was Banner’s voice in his head, counting quietly to five. _In for five, hold for five, out for five, hold for five. In for five…_

“That was the first and last time I was ever on a roller-coaster,” Steve said, trying to keep the rage in his chest from bleeding into his voice. “Even today, I haven’t been on one. Always thought I’d go on my first one after the war — after the serum — with you. It would be full circle. We’d be back home, safe. Because we’d always get home safe. All of us, you, me, Dum Dum, Morita, all the Commandos. Do you remember them?”

Steve didn’t expect a response and he didn’t get one, so he kept talking.

“They were heartbroken, after — after you died. None of us got out without losing someone, but we’d all figured we’d make it. We were the _Howling Commandos_ , after all. We were immortal. But after you fell, it was different. We realized we weren’t… We were mortal, human. None of ‘em pulled out, though. Nobody even thought about it. Except me. I thought about it a lot on the nights I tried to drink myself into a stupor, just to find out that I can’t.”

Steve cleared his throat and fell silent. He hadn’t meant to start talking about this.

“Ya ne pomnyu,” Bucky whispered. “Proshu proshsheniya. Ya ne pomnyu.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said, his voice sticking in his throat. “I can’t.”

He stood and ducked back into the tent. Conscious that Bucky, if he moved from his self-imposed exile, could see him through the fabric, Steve didn’t take the moment he wanted to compose himself. He picked up the small, wrapped parcel that held his art supplies and stepped back out, returning to his place on the log. Bucky hadn’t moved.

Steve unfolded the oil cloth reverently. Drawing had always been a catharsis for him, something that hadn’t changed through the years. He’d been able to draw just as well the day after the serum as the day before and just as well the day after he’d woken up from the ice.

“I used to draw for you,” Steve said, setting the charcoal out on their cloth in front of him. “Things that made you laugh when we were both starving. An elephant with a daisy in its trunk. I don’t know why you liked that one so much. When the war was just starting, when we heard Germany was marching, I would draw you as a Sergeant.”

Steve let his hand move, hardly paying attention to what formed beneath his fingers. The broad arc of a line would become what it needed to be.

“Sergeant Barnes,” Steve said. “I was proud of you, even if I was pretty jealous. Silly now, isn’t it? Where would we be if we hadn’t gone to war? Who would we be?”

More lines joined that arc, delineating a horizon and hulking shapes in the distance.

“Dead, probably,” Steve continued. He added shapes in the foreground, two large shapes closer, and eight others spaced around them. “I should find that funny. I don’t. We’d be dead, buried. Instead, we’re both here.”

It wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. He didn’t want to celebrate the hint that Bucky’s memories may still be there with talk of their dead friends. Steve let himself focus on the drawing, beginning to understand what his hand was trying to draw. There was still time to change it if he wanted. Those shapes beginning to narrow at the middle could still become trees. He could smooth out the harsh angles of the shapes at the back, make them rocks or even bears.

He didn’t make the changes. He doubted he really could.

Steve drew, accompanied only by the sound of the wind and the steady in and out of Bucky’s breath. It sounded the same as he remembered in bedrooms and back porches and under a hostile German sky. When he’d woken up afraid that his mother started coughing again or from a dream that Hydra’s tanks rolled into their camp, all he’d needed was to hear Bucky’s steady breaths at his back. That had been enough to stave off the anxiety-related asthma as a child.

When it got too dark to continue, Steve examined the picture by firelight. It was mostly finished, the foreboding shapes in the background had turned into tanks with weapons turrets. The Swiss Alps broke the smooth horizon. The smaller shapes had turned into people, complete in every detail except their faces. They were empty.

Steve crumpled the paper and threw it into the fire. He turned his back on it and went into the tent, closing his eyes and forcing himself to sleep.

He dreamed that night. Well, he dreamed most nights, but this was the dream the psychologists back at SHIELD always asked him to write down for later analysis. Processing, they called it. They weren’t psychoanalysts. They helped him process his dreams. He hadn’t gone to the mandated sessions and he hadn’t written down his dreams.

They were all together again, the Commandos, moving through a German forest. Everything was going well. Nobody had spotted any soldiers between them and the compound, and they were moving at a steady clip. He could see Bucky on his left and Falsworth on his right. And then everything changed.

Between one step and another they’d moved from a forest, chilly at night but still warm enough for comfort, to a mountainside. They were running at the breakneck speed soldiers only used when the retreat had turned into a rout. Even his breath was coming faster.

Dernier appeared in front of him for just a moment, running at an angle toward Steve. His foot broke through the snow and he stumbled. Steve reached for him, but there wasn’t enough time. Dernier’s mouth opened and he was screaming something Steve couldn’t hear. He disappeared beneath the snow before Steve could even touch his hand and when Steve dropped to his knees to sift through the drifts, he found only snow.

Falsworth passed him, running with Dum Dum and Morita. “C’mon, Cap! What are you doing?” Falsworth shouted. “Tired already?”

Steve tried to yell to them that it wasn’t safe. Hydra had some new weapon. He couldn’t hear his own voice, and they didn’t notice. A hand caught his upper arm and pulled him to his feet. It was Jones.

Steve was about to thank him when he heard an aborted scream. He spun to face it to see only Dum Dum, staring at empty snow. He turned back to Jones to bark some orders about taking cover and getting Dum Dum safe, but nobody was there. Frozen in place, he looked back to Dum Dum and had time only to register his expression of horror before he disappeared in a flash of blue light from one of the Hydra weapons, leaving only his afterimage and even that faded.

He was running again without even realizing he’d started moving. Bucky, whom he’d lost sight of when Falsworth disappeared, was back at his side, face dark and grim.

“We’ve got to regroup,” Bucky said between sharp breaths. “Check in with the Colonel—”

They were falling. Bucky reached for him, shouting his name and Steve could hear the betrayal in his voice. _How could you let me fall again?_ his voice asked. He could see it in Bucky’s eyes. But it wouldn’t happen the same this time. He would change things.

Steve pulled his shield off his back, reaching with his other hand for Bucky. Their fingers brushed. He would do as he had done with Natasha and Sam before: Pull them both onto the shield and cushion the fall with his own body. It might not change anything. There was no way of knowing if even his body could survive that fall. But he would try.

Bucky’s fingers never closed on his. When he looked back, Bucky was further down, hand still outstretched. Steve angled himself in Bucky’s direction. This was something he could do. He had done this dozens of times before. He could freefall from an airplane in a storm and still hit his mark. He could reach Bucky.

But he couldn’t move. He still felt the stomach-dropping sensation of falling, wind whipping past him, but he wasn’t falling. Bucky fell faster, further from him until he was just feet above the ground. The scream that had been building in his throat finally broke free.

“No! Bucky!”

A soldier who woke up from nightmares screaming was a dead soldier. Steve knew better, but the sight of Bucky falling a second time, the ground rushing up to meet him, shattered his training into thousands of broken pieces. He screamed.

Steve’s eyes snapped open and he sat up, hands reaching on reflex for the weapons that were always within reach. His hand closed on segmented metal and a warm hand pressed against his chest, over his heart. For a moment he was back in New York in 1939 and that hand rising and falling with his frantic, asthmatic breaths.

“I’m right here, Steve.” And Steve suddenly wasn’t sure if he was still dreaming. “Right here. Breathe with me, Steve.”

The metal hand lifted Steve’s hand to his chest. The sensation was so familiar that Steve couldn’t believe he wasn’t dreaming, even when his eyes focused on the dark shape before him, long hair and scars that shouldn’t be there in dreams. Steve’s body matched Bucky’s slow, calm breaths the way it always had, an ingrained reflex he couldn’t have stopped even if he’d been so inclined.

“Go to sleep,” Bucky whispered, fingers folding over Steve’s fingers. “I’m here.”

The hand on his chest was a steady but inexorable pressure, easing him back into his blankets. He drifted back to sleep, soothed by the familiar feeling of Bucky’s right shoulder against Steve’s left. Bucky twined their fingers together. They hadn’t slept like this since childhood — and one night in the Swiss Alps after a mission that had left them all shaken.

He still wasn’t sure if he’d dreamt it when he woke up alone the next morning. The tent was empty of any additional pillows or blankets, and only the barest hint of an additional depression in the padded floor beside him, which could have been as much imagination as fact.

Bucky was crouched by the fire frying two fish when Steve emerged. He didn’t say anything, but he did look straight at Steve, and Steve hardly dared move. Bucky’s gaze was steadier, focused, without any of the piercing Winter Soldier in his eyes.

“Your face is familiar.”

Steve had been paying so much attention to Bucky’s eyes that he didn’t notice Bucky speaking right away.

“I don’t know you, but I know your face. Why?”

“We were friends,” Steve said, stepping closer. Bucky rose to his feet in a single motion, taking a step back. He angled his body just slightly, his right arm toward Steve. Steve stilled, holding his hands a little out to the sides, palms up. “Back before the war. 1944, do you remember?”

Bucky frowned, eyes flicking down as he tried to remember. “White,” he said at last. “White and cold and—”

_Pain._

Steve could see Bucky’s mouth form the word, even if he put no voice to it. The Winter Soldier felt no pain.

“All the stories I’ve told you were real. We did those things together. You, me. The time we were so broke and hungry you stole that loaf of bread and I made you go back and pay for it as soon as we had money. Do you remember that?”

Bucky sank to his knees, hands on his thighs, head bowed. Steve had tried and failed to get some response from him when he had been like this before, so he didn’t even bother this time. He rescued the burning fish from the fire, but his appetite had disappeared. He set it on a flat rock and pulled out his art supplies again.

He stayed silent while he set everything up, but once he’d bound the paper to his drawing board, he knew he had to start talking again. They were making progress and he wasn’t about to give up now.

Eyes on Bucky’s still form, Steve searched his memory for something he hadn’t already talked about. It had never been difficult to talk to Bucky, even as he fought the Winter Soldier, praying his friend was still inside. Now that he knew Bucky was in there, somehow it got difficult.

“I don’t really remember my dad,” Steve said as he started sketching. This time he knew what he would draw. It had to be Bucky, all the broken memories and pain and solid strength contained within his kneeling body. “But I remember my ma. I mean, I wasn’t so old when she died, but I still remember a lot about her. I’m forgetting some stuff. I don’t remember so much what she sounded like or smelled like and her shape is getting a little fuzzy, but I remember her.

“What I remember most about her dying is you. I didn’t even tell you at first. I should’ve. I skipped class the day the doctor was supposed to come and you got there just after he left. ‘She’s sick, isn’t she?’ you asked. ‘How bad?’ I couldn’t answer you then. I hadn’t — I couldn’t even understand it myself. How was I supposed to explain it to you?”

Steve’s throat locked, holding his voice in for a few moments. He hadn’t thought about this in a long time, and he’d expected the sharp grief to have faded. Some of this pain was the loss of his mother, but a good deal of it was the loss of his Bucky.

He’d gone to war to protect people, to stop bullies. Then Bucky had fallen from Zola’s train and Steve wanted them all to pay with blood and bone. He hadn’t even had enough time to mourn Bucky before he was fighting some insane alien-god-thing in a world that made no sense with a team as far from his Commandos as he could ever imagine.

And then Bucky was back, but he wasn’t.

“You burst into the house, even though ma tried to keep you out ‘cause she didn’t want you getting sick too. But you came back every day to make sure I could keep up in school, even though I wasn’t going. You brought us food when we couldn’t afford it, and I know you couldn’t either. Do you remember? You pretty much moved in near the end.

“One night I started coughing. I thought I’d caught it. You kept telling me that I wasn’t sick or that it was a cold. I got colds all the time, after all. If it wasn’t asthma, it was a cold or pneumonia or some sort of infection.”

Steve looked up from his drawing, but Bucky hadn’t moved.

“It was bronchitis. A round of antibiotics I couldn’t afford later, I was healthy enough for the funeral.”

Steve sighed, and it was that sound that drew Bucky’s gaze up to him. There was a faint line between his eyebrows, consternation or frustration or something that Steve couldn’t quite identify. With no idea what else to do, Steve cleared his throat and started telling Bucky about his own family.

He had expected this to be the start of Bucky getting better. He’d expected more conversation from him, but there was none. He was as silent for the next week as he had been that first full day, even if he no longer skulked along the outer edges of the clearing. Steve woke most mornings to fresh breakfast and a burning fire, but Bucky was still wary of him. He kept several body-lengths between them, always holding himself at that strange angle, left side turned away.

Steve ran out of stories so he sketched. That picture of Bucky on his knees was always clipped at the front of his book, but he drew their friends from Brooklyn and the war. He drew the battles he remembered and he drew one of Bucky falling, but that one went straight into the flames and Steve watched it burn with fire in his heart.

It rained on the seventeenth day. Not the sprinkles intermixed with steady rain it had been on his first few days there. It poured and Steve couldn’t help but remember the rain during the war. The days when it was impossible to get dry or stay dry and even he was always cold. They called him the ultimate soldier, but even he wasn’t immune to those memories. Steve spent his day in the tent and after a few hours Bucky joined him. He sat near the tent flap and watched Steve draw.

Steve knew what he must look like. Barton had commented on it once when he’d been pacing in Stark Tower, kept inside by torrential winter rain. “You look caged,” he had said. “This is hard for you, isn’t it?” Steve had given him some speech about being a soldier and doing what he needed to do, but Barton only nodded. He didn’t know Barton well, but he recognized something familiar in him.

Drawing wasn’t always a solace, especially in weather like this. Especially since Bucky had risen from his snow-and-ice grave. But Steve had to do something and so he drew, SHIELD designed tech giving off enough warmth and light to keep the tent comfortable and bright.

“Steve.”

Steve jumped, hand making a stray charcoal mark across the face of the first man he’d ever killed. A metal hand pulled the paper from him and crumpled it, tossing it into the tent corner. He’d been so absorbed in the drawing that he hadn’t even noticed Bucky’s approach. Stupid. This weather was going to get him killed one day.

“Bucky?”

That look was back on Bucky’s face, the one he’d been wearing for the past week. His eyebrows were furrowed and his eyes dark.

“You look upset,” Bucky said, the words coming slowly as though he was struggling to find them. “Why are you upset?”

“It’s nothing,” Steve said.

“I don’t know why,” Bucky said, each word coming after a long pause, “but I don’t like it when you’re upset. It makes…” He pressed his right hand to his chest. “I can feel it.”

“It’s nothing, Bucky.”

Bucky made a face and it almost made Steve laugh. He looked so much like his Bucky right then, his eyebrows lifted and an almost-smile. There was no warmth there, nothing that truly made Bucky Bucky, but Steve could almost see it.

“I don’t like it.”

Steve set his artwork aside, leaning back on his hands. He nodded toward the paper in the corner. “How do you know I wasn’t drawing some dame?”

The look he got was the closest thing to a smile he’d seen since standing before a zipline in 1944. There was no real noticeable change, his lips didn’t move and no lines appeared by his eyes, but Steve thought he could sense the tiniest twitch of muscles at the corner of Bucky’s mouth.

“Never seen a dame like that.” Then the smile was gone and the frown was back on his face. “You used to look…” Bucky paused for so long that Steve almost thought he’d lost what he was going to say. “You used to look so happy when you drew. I think. I don’t _remember_!”

Bucky grabbed at his head, hands fisting in his hair. Steve’s scramble to his side was a bit more than undignified and he couldn’t help but imagine Natasha’s face if she’d seen it. He seized Bucky’s wrists and pulled them down, trying to see through the long hair into Bucky’s eyes.

“It’s okay, Buck. You don’t have to remember everything right away. It’s only been two weeks and you’re already doing so well—”

Bucky laughed, a bitter and violent sound. “Stop talking to me like — I do remember the girls in the infirmary. When a guy had lost a leg or took a bullet through the gut, it was always, ‘Don’t push yourself too hard’ and ‘You’re doing so well.’”

He tried to pull away, but Steve didn’t let go. “Don’t make me break your arm again.”

“The hell you would,” Bucky snapped, but he fell still. If not for the constant tension in the muscles of his flesh arm, Steve could have imagined he was sitting with a statue. “My head — I can’t… There’s something in there. Something alive and cold and it burns when I try to get around it.”

“There are people who can help you,” Steve said. “I’ve got friends.”

“Like your Black Widow?” Bucky asked. “You think she’ll help me? She’d put a knife in my back and I wouldn’t blame her!”

The anger in Bucky’s voice startled Steve enough that he loosened his grip on Bucky’s wrists. His left arm pulled free, hand fisting, and then he slouched over so far that his head nearly touched Steve’s knee.

Despite himself, Steve rested his hand on the back of Bucky’s head. “Nat’s a good woman. If anyone understands, it would be her.”

“My head,” Bucky whispered, free hand grabbing at his hair again.

Steve ran his fingers through Bucky’s hair. “I know,” he said, feeling a sharp pain in his chest that had to have been less than nothing compared to whatever had reduced Bucky to such a state in front of him. “I know it hurts.”

“I can’t stay in control much longer.”

“It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll be here when you come back.”

“I could come back and you could be dead. I could kill you.”

“I’m pretty sure we already established you can’t actually kill me. It’s okay, Bucky. Take a break. I’m with you.”

“Call your friends,” Bucky said, voice taut with the kind of agony Steve didn’t think he could even imagine. Then the tension eased from his body and he straightened, that blank expression smoothing the pain from his face. Steve let Bucky’s wrist slip through his fingers and Bucky rested both hands on his knees. He whispered something in Russian and then went silent, aside from his slow, steady breaths.

Steve dragged himself away from Bucky and grabbed his pack, fishing out the cell phone Natasha had shoved into his hand while he was packing. Every time he’d set it down to do something else, she’d pushed it back into his hand. He considered calling her, but dialed Stark’s number instead. The phone rang twice.

“Cap?”

“I need your help.”

There was a pause and Steve could almost imagine Stark warring with himself, deciding if he was going to demand compensation now or if he was going to be the man Steve knew he could be, if he’d just grow up a little bit. “What do you need?”

“Evac. I’m in—”

“I can see you. SHIELD needs to make those tents a little less conspicuous. I can be there in, oh, four hours? Work for you?”

“As soon as possible.”

“You’re in Ukraine, Cap. It’s not like I can teleport to you.”

“Tony…” Steve could hear Pepper’s voice through the phone and Stark sighed.

“Yeah, four hours. Maybe less. Quick as I can. No stopping for gelato in Italy. On the way back, maybe.”

Their phones disconnected, leaving Steve to try to decide how to spend the next four hours. Packing up all their belongings, including the few of Bucky’s he’d discovered, took less than half an hour.

It was still pouring rain when he ducked back into the tent. He looked at Bucky, still and silent, and felt that sharp pain in his chest and stomach again. He had to hope there was something left, something that could stay, because if he got Bucky back just to lose him again, Steve didn’t think he could survive it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to survive it.

Steve sat and watched him, counted his breaths, tracked each twitch of his fingers or eyes beneath closed lids. He was too still, no human could possibly sit that still, but there was more movement than there had been before. The Winter Soldier was cracking, minute and almost impossible to see, but there was warmth beneath the ice. There had to be.

A few hours later, Steve heard the thrumming of a helicopter. He started to rise and make sure that it was Stark when he heard a sharp whistling, almost silent beneath the sound of the rotors. He felt a pinch against the front of his shoulder and crumpled to the ground before he could even begin to worry.


	2. Feeling of Being

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Playlist is still [here](http://open.spotify.com/user/129150009/playlist/1ewF2sYM7mD9b9RoMYplsA). All chapter titles come from songs on it.

When Steve woke, it wasn’t to the tent or to Bucky, but to the feeling of reinforced metal straps across his arms, legs, chest, hips, and throat. His sight swam for a few seconds after he opened his eyes and then Natasha appeared in his field of vision, concern twisting her features.

“What the hell is this?” Steve demanded, pulling at the bindings. They refused to give, the one over his throat keeping him from getting enough torque to force himself free. “What’s going on?”

“Steve, you need to calm down for a second—”

“Where is Bucky? What did you do to him?”

“We haven’t done anything to him,” Barton’s voice said, and then he stepped up to Natasha’s side, hand on his bow. That was a bad sign. Barton often went armed these days, he had since Loki, but to Steve’s memory he’d never reached for his weapons outside of battle. “You need to stay calm, Cap. That’s going to get these restraints off you a lot faster than pulling them off.”

He made himself relax against the table as much as he could, letting his head drop back onto a pillow he hadn’t noticed at first. He had roughly thirty questions, most of them about Bucky, but he chose the one most relevant to his current situation. “Why am I tied up?”

“Coulson’s orders,” Natasha said, popping some gum. She’d apparently gotten a taste for it since stealing the flash drive Fury had given him. “He wasn’t happy to give them, but after what happened the last time you woke up unexpectedly in New York, I can’t say I blame him. My orders are to let you go as soon as you’re reasonably calm; Clint’s orders are to make sure I don’t let you go too early. SHIELD is big on contingency plans now.”

“Where is Bucky?”

Natasha and Barton exchanged an uneasy glance. “He’s fine,” Natasha said.

“Holding cell, top floor,” Barton said. “Before you ask, you’re on the floor above Tony’s workshop. There’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot of agents between you and him. You’ll get to see him; you just need to be calm.”

“Holding cell?” Steve echoed. Despited himself, he jerked again at the restraints, feeling them bite against his skin. “You locked him up?”

That rage was back, the helpless sort of anger he’d first felt after Bucky fell and only seemed to rise again when he was involved.

Barton held up a syringe between two fingers. “If you look like you’re going to break free, I have orders to use this. It’s what we used to knock you out the first time. It lasted sixteen hours. They figure it won’t work as well a second time, but eight or ten hours is a long while, Cap. A lot of things can happen.”

Steve had gotten a few centimeters of give on the band over his left thigh, but he gave up, head thunking back onto the table and missing the pillow. He grimaced.

“Tasha, give us a few minutes, would you?” Barton asked. Natasha had moved out of Steve’s range of sight, but judging by the pause before he heard her footsteps, she and Barton had one of their silent arguments. Apparently he’d won. “And take your listening devices with you!”

The footsteps came back and Steve heard something slide off a table, then the door shut behind her. Barton slipped the syringe in a pocket and set about unhooking the straps. Steve only waited for them to loosen enough for him to move and then he ripped them the rest of the way off, swinging his legs over the table and standing up.

Barton backed away, reaching for the syringe, but Steve shook his head, holding up a hand.

“I’m okay. Really, really annoyed, but okay.”

Barton gave him another long, searching look, but he swung his leg over a rolling chair and turned it to follow Steve as he paced.

“He really is safe,” Barton said. “Tasha and I have been checking in on him every day. Stark rigged the cell so it has 24-hour surveillance. He’s even put JARVIS on guard duty. It sends an alert any time he stays still for too long or if he gets too active. And Stark has it set up so if anyone enters the room, everyone gets notified. And I mean anyone. It goes off every time Tasha or I go in. Even Coulson, Stark, and Fury.” Barton tapped his ear, where Steve could see a small device. “Everyone has a direct line to Thor in case something goes down we can’t handle.”

There was an implied ‘with either of you’ at the end of the sentence that Steve chose not to hear. “Can I see him?”

“Tasha’s probably setting it up now. Just stay calm or I might get orders to use the sedative anyway. I kind of get the feeling that Barnes is staying here for your sake. If I’m forced to shoot you in front of him, I think even the Banner-and-Stark patented cell won’t hold him for long.

“I want to see him.”

Barton stood up and gestured to the door. “After you, Cap.”

The elevator ride was impossible with the jaunty elevator music that Steve knew Stark had only installed because it annoyed people and Barton standing just out of arms’ reach on the far side. It reminded him of his Strike Team’s final betrayal. They’d been the closest thing he had to the Commandos — well trained and they followed orders without question. Except they had followed the order to kill him, and likely would have succeeded if not for the timing of a news helicopter.

Barton must have picked up on his unease, because he said, “Straight up the holding cell, no stops.”

“Acknowledged, sir,” JARVIS’s voice said.

The elevator doors dinged open. Steve had never been on this floor, but the elevator opened on a dark hallway with a single door at the end. Barton passed him to key in a code and stepped through the door first. Steve followed him into a small room, made smaller by the transparent partition between the two halves.

Bucky was on the other side, sitting on the cot with his head back against the wall. His eyes were open, tracking their movements in the other room. His metal arm was covered in the tiny disks Natasha had thrown at him to disable his arm, but he was showered and dressed in clean clothes, black pants and shirt, and there was an empty plate sitting to one side of his bed. Steve could see some discarded books, one laying open to mark a page, and there was even a television on their side of the room.

“Each one of those taser disks is separately controlled and capable of being activated independently of one another. Or all at once,” Stark’s voice said. Steve spun to face the sound, expecting to see one of his holograms or whatever he called them, but the man himself was emerging from another door Steve hadn’t noticed at first. Stark shrugged. “It was that or take off his arm. I figured you wouldn’t be too pleased if that was the way you saw him for the first time.”

“I’m not too pleased he’s in here at all,” Steve said. He tried for a mild voice, but it came out like a growl. Bucky reacted to that, the first real movement Steve had seen since his arrival. He straightened on the bed, gaze sharpening. Steve began to understand what Barton meant.

“Yeah, me either,” Stark said. “If it were up to me, I’d have left him in Ukraine. But you would have thrown a fit then, too, so I had to bring him along. And I’m not leaving him in SHIELD custody, so… here he is.”

That was unexpected. “Thinking of other people, Stark?”

Stark shrugged again, keeping his eyes on Bucky. There was a strange tightness to his lips, but his voice was light. “Pepper says it’s important to practice empathy. And she wouldn’t let me yell at Agent Coulson for not being dead, so I figured this was the next best way to get back at him.”

“Stark?” Bucky’s voice was strange, piped through the speakers in his room. He stood up, walking close to the partition and examining Tony with narrowed eyes. When he spoke again, he sounded like he was reading. “Mission objective: Neutralization of Howard Stark, by any means necessary. Mission requirements: Neutralization must appear to be natural or an accident.”

Stark’s face was surprisingly still, but Steve could see his jaw clench. He let out a sharp breath, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“I’m sorry,” Steve began, but Stark cut him off.

“You didn’t murder them.”

“We knew he had blood on his hands when we brought him in,” Barton said. “There’s no blame here, Stark. Hydra drew the bow; he was just the arrow. He’s no different than Tasha or me.”

“Yeah, but she’s prettier than either of you,” Stark said. The words came just as Steve expected, but they seemed automatic. Stark’s body was so tense he was almost shaking. “It makes sense Hydra would want him dead. Did he see you when you killed him? Did he ask how you survived? Why you wanted to kill him? Did he ask you to spare his wife and did you care? Or had she already seen you and it was too late?”

Bucky was frowning and Steve could tell he was fighting to remember. He lifted his right hand to his forehead, grimacing. “He-he didn’t… He didn’t see me. I don’t… I can’t remember.”

“The hell you can’t—”

Steve caught Stark’s shoulder. “I think you’d better leave.”

“I’ll take him,” Barton said. It didn’t take much for him to escort Stark to the elevator, and then Steve was alone with Bucky. Well, as alone as he got with the surveillance.

Bucky was watching him, eyes wide with distress. “I killed Howard Stark?” he asked. “Our friend?”

Steve wanted to lie and tell him that the Howard Stark they knew lived to a ripe old age, but he nodded instead. “He was killed in a car accident in 1991.”

Bucky mumbled a curse in Russian and crumpled onto the bed. “How many more of our friends did I kill?”

Steve didn’t answer. There was no way of knowing how many people he had killed in the years he’d been Hydra’s top assassin. “It wasn’t you. This isn’t something you did. The Winter Soldier—”

“I am the Winter Soldier. He’s in my head. I can feel him moving around in there, ripping at my memories. I remember something and I forget it a second later. I see faces in my sleep, terrified ones, angry ones, sad ones. I see you, and he tries to destroy you the most. What is it that makes him so angry?”

Steve spotted a transmitter apparently left behind by Barton and slipped it into his ear. He could hear a bustle of voices, each one talking over the other, but he cut through them all. “Natasha, let me in.”

“I don’t think that’s smart, Steve. You don’t know what—”

“He’s hurting, Nat. Let me in. And turn off your cameras.”

“He should be hurting—”

“Shut up, Tony. He shot me, remember? Twice. Okay, Steve. I’m going to seal the door and drop the barrier between you. If he attacks you, there’s nothing we can do. We won’t even know and we can’t risk unleashing him on the rest of the Tower. We have innocents in here.”

“I was alone with him for weeks, Natasha. If he was going to do something, he would have already.” He pulled out the earpiece and tossed it to the table behind him.

True to her word, there was a hydraulic hiss as the door locked and then a rattling sound as the barrier slid through the floor. Steve jumped it, and then he was standing beside Bucky, sliding his arm around Bucky’s shoulders and pulling him tight.

Bucky gripped his forearm and Steve expected to be pushed away, but the hand stayed still.

“I killed him.” It was almost a wail, the sharpest emotion Steve had heard from Bucky yet. “I killed—”

“Bucky, listen to me. Nobody blames you. It wasn’t your fault.”

“He does,” Bucky said, nodding toward the door through which Stark had disappeared. “He goes to pick you up from the Ukraine and comes home with the man who murdered his father. Leave, Steve, before I hurt you too.”

“You won’t. You couldn’t do it before. You can’t do it now.”

“I shot you. I remember that much. I shot you and if you had been anyone but you, I would have killed you and never known the difference.”

Steve shook his head. “We’ll get this sorted out and then we’ll get you out of here. You can come live with me again, if you want. Stark — He might have some trouble fixing you at first, but Banner will help. He’ll get on board, though. He knows it wasn’t really you, it’s just—”

“Go,” Bucky said, finally pulling away.

Steve’s arms fell to his sides and he felt bereft, as though Bucky had taken something away he needed. Steve grit his teeth, but stepped to the other side of the barrier and picked up the earpiece. “I’m out.” The barrier slid back up and the door unlocked. “Where’s Coulson?”

Natasha answered him without hesitation. “The SHIELD section of the tower. Thirty-second floor, room 3204.”

“Somebody gonna warn him the Captain’s on the warpath?” Barton asked.

“Nope,” Natasha said. “This one he’s facing on his own.”

They had neglected to tell him, Steve realized when he stormed into the room, that Coulson was in the middle of a meeting. He also realized he didn’t care.

“Coulson.”

The meeting was made up of a small group of agents, three women and two men. The Asian woman stepped up at Coulson’s side as soon as Steve entered. One of the men and another woman actually took wide-eyed steps back, while the remaining man and woman moved in front of that two.

Coulson held up a hand and the woman at his side relaxed. But she relaxed the way Natasha relaxed, visibly, but still too aware of what was going on.

“Give us some privacy, please. We’ll pick up on the bus at 0900 tomorrow.”

“Why is Bucky locked up—” Steve began before the agents even left the room.

“Captain Rogers,” Coulson said in a quiet voice, “I understand that you’re upset. However, you need to understand that this man is an assassin.”

“Was.”

“Is.” Coulson took a few moments to straighten the papers on the table, tucking some into a manila folder. “You aren’t exactly an impartial observer here, but we have to consider that maybe this man isn’t Sergeant Barnes.”

“You will let him go.”

Coulson handed the folder over. His voice was hard when he spoke again. Steve forgot sometimes that as the years had changed, so had the men who ran the world and commanded him. Not everyone was Fury or Colonel Phillips.

“I will once we’re certain that the Winter Soldier is out of his head. Do you know what they did to him every time they yanked him out of cryo?” When Steve shook his head, Coulson tapped the folder. “While you were hunting him across every continent, we sent Natasha and Agent May to get the rest of this information. Everything relevant is there. Read it and try to understand what’s going on in your friend’s head. You’ve made some great progress, but what was done to him might be irreversible. Do you want to be to blame when his programming—” Steve flinched at the word “—gets activated and he goes on a rampage? If there’s nothing to stop him, do you want to be responsible for all the deaths? Fury would have to assign the Avengers, and you’re the only one who can match him in combat.”

“‘Irreversible?’” Steve echoed. “‘Nothing to stop him’? You make it sound like you’ll be installing a kill switch.”

“If we have to.” Coulson’s voice was too hard for it to be true disinterest. “He will be our responsibility and if we don’t consider everything that could go wrong, we will have done everyone a great disservice.”

“So we’ve all got our kill switches then,” Steve said. “The cage in the helicarrier was just the start. The tranquilizer. What about Natasha and Barton? Will you force one of them to kill the other if something goes wrong? What happened to trusting your team? We’ve shown we can do your work. We routed Hydra—”

“This isn’t 1945. Things have changed.”

“I’ve noticed.”

Clenching the folder in his fist, Steve turned for the door.

“Captain Rogers,” Coulson called. “Take a step back. Think about it.”

Steve let the door slam behind him. He hesitated in the hallway, unsure of where to go. He couldn’t go back to the top floor as angry as he was. Things were confusing enough for Bucky without this. He went instead to Sleeping Quarters Six, the one Stark had designed for him. The entry room was an obnoxious mix of red, white, and blue. Flags and stars everywhere. Steve kicked his shoes off hard enough they ricocheted off the wall. Through the next door everything fell to a muted tan and brown. He sensed Pepper’s hand in that design. The kitchen was always kept stocked, but Steve rarely bothered to cook. With the SHIELD agents using Stark Tower as a temporary base one of the lower floors had been converted into a mess hall, and Steve ate there most of the time.

He sat at the island in his kitchen and opened the file. The first page was a photograph of a cryo chamber. It was old technology, a single window in the front and heavy steel. It looked like the technology he recognized. He’d seen the likes of it before in Dr. Erskine’s lab. The chamber wasn’t an exact replica, or even a near copy, but Steve could see the similarities. There were dents in the front, ones that could have been made by a metal fist. A zoomed-in insert showed a red smear in one of the deeper dents. Waking up the Winter Soldier didn’t seem to be a risk-free job.

He turned the page. The next picture was of a chair with thick iron bands that would close across biceps and forearms. A strange contraption hung a handful of inches above the chair’s headrest. It wasn’t hard to imagine Bucky strapped to that chair, and once he read the next few lines it was even easier. He must have been in agony. Several destroyed mouth guards had been found nearby, one nearly bitten in half.

The next pages were all descriptions of things Steve didn’t understand. Neurotransmitters and norepinepherine and glutamate and excessive acetycholine and seretonin. Lines and lines of mathematical formulas and phrases like “administration of morphine reduces the effectiveness of the wiping process by thirty-seven percent” and “subject must remain conscious for at least the first thirty seconds of the process; there does not appear to be any statistically significant change in effectiveness after that … repeated trials have shown a marginal, but not significant, increase in abilities if the subject is rendered unconscious between the forty-five and fifty second mark.” It went on from there to talk about the best ways to render unconsciousness, “sharp increase in voltage,” “sudden administration of severe pain” was apparently the preferred and most effective method, as long as what every they used contained minimal acetyl acid.

Steve could read no further when they started describing the most technical aspects of the Winter Soldier. Increased speed, increased strength, that was fine. The tests they had run on him, the injections and the beatings and the hours without sleep or food or water, just to see what he could survive, what they could pit him up against and reasonably expect — that was they phrase they used, “reasonably expect” — him to survive. He skimmed paragraphs about his training and how he was an important asset, but that his training suited him ideally to situations in which it would be “impractical to send other agents.”

It made him sick to his stomach. His throat clenched and he couldn’t breathe. This was impossible. Nobody should have been able to survive this. Part of him wished Bucky had died in the fall. At least that would have been more humane than this.

“Captain Rogers, do you require assistance?” JARVIS asked. “Your heart rate, blood pressure, and respirations have increased significantly above your normal levels.”

“I’m fine,” Steve said, biting out the words. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome, sir. Would you like the direct feed from Sergeant Barnes’s cell transmitted to your viewing screen?”

Steve hadn’t even known that was an option. Either Stark truly did have a heart or, much more likely, JARVIS hadn’t been made aware of his creator’s current mood. “Yes.”

There was a soft whirring noise and a screen rose from the center of the island. Bucky was kneeling silently on the floor, but he seemed to be curled in on himself, fists digging into his thighs. A movement reflected on the partition caught his eye.

“Who’s in there with him?”

“Agent Barton, sir. He has been there for the last twenty-two minutes.”

“How have they been treating him?”

“They have abided by all tenants of the Geneva Convention. He has received adequate nutrition and fluid intake to sustain his current metabolic requirements. Agents Barton and Romanoff bring him additional items for his entertainment on a near daily basis. His vital signs remain within the limits I have assessed to be standard for him. However, he sleeps less than an average of two hours per night, and much of it is not consecutive.”

Steve put his head down on the table.

“His social interactions leave something to be desired. His exchange with you today was the most he has interacted—”

“I thought I told Natasha to shut down all the cameras.”

“I am not a camera, sir.” Steve thought JARVIS actually sounded offended. “Your time together was recorded and assessed, but will not be available for further analysis unless it becomes ultimately necessary.”

Steve didn’t ask what he meant by “ultimately necessary.” He didn’t think he wanted to know. Unwilling to go back to the cell whether or not Barton was there, he changed slowly into some old workout clothes. The folder lay harmlessly on his table in front of the viewscreen showing his kneeling friend, but the thought of going back to it and reading more about how the presence of additional injuries changed the length of time it took a clean break of the femur to heal made him physically ill. He hadn’t felt so much as the urge to vomit in lifetimes, but it was a near thing now, even without the pictures.

A shock of pain made its way up his arm and Steve stared blankly at the whole in the wall.

“I’ll alert maintenance, shall I?” JARVIS asked, and Steve didn’t understand how a computerized voice could sound so wry. Probably had developed it after years of dealing with Stark.

Steve jogged through the empty hallways toward the gym. SHIELD agents had access only to the first few floors and several additional ones for conference rooms, but the rest of the building was blessedly private. The gym Stark had designed after the initial destruction of his tower was big enough for all of the Avengers. It took up three whole floors, with climbing ropes dangling through all three floors and the opening in the middle large enough for even Sam to fly through the center, although he rarely used it. Each of the Avengers had their own section kitted out to their particular talents.

Steve ignored his own corner and headed instead to the track in the middle of the second floor. A box near the door controlled a programmable incline and Steve dialed it as high as it would go, still not as high as he wanted, and started running. Exercise had never been enough to completely settle his mind, but he figured if he kept at this until he physically could no longer run, it might just do it this time.

He ran until his legs and lungs burned, but he never reached that level of exhaustion. He didn’t keep track of how long he’d been running, but it must have been at least four hours before the track flattened out beneath his feet and he stumbled. He spun to see who had come in.

Stark was standing along the railing, arms crossed over the top bar. “Short straw,” he said, as though that explained anything.

“If you’re going to make some comment about how we should… put him on ice… you should turn around now and leave,” Steve said.

He turned his back on Stark and headed for the stairs down to the first floor. They came out near his section of the gym, outfitted with punching bags and weights and treadmills. With nothing better to do, he headed toward the punching bags, running his hand along the familiar fabric.

“Nope,” Stark said, having followed him down. “I got the short straw to come down here and talk to you after the last fourteen of JARVIS’s warnings that your heart rate was well beyond what was sustainable even for you. Would you just stand still? You’re making me dizzy just watching you.”

With a great deal of effort, Steve managed to stop pacing. He folded his hands behind his back and took a deep breath. He could at least see what Stark had to say.

“Wow. Way to make that look easy.” Stark cleared his throat. “He’s gonna be okay. Bruce already thinks he’s figured out what they did to him and how to reverse it. It shouldn’t be hard. It just takes a sustained charge of—” Steve raised his eyebrows and Stark finished with, “—awesomeness. I’m not gonna lie to you. It’s gonna hurt him a lot, but it’s like fixing a broken bone. It hurts when you set it, but then it feels better. Or, not right away. But it heals a hell of a lot better once it’s been set than if you don’t set it at all and hope.”

The analogy reminded Steve of the photographs of Bucky’s shattered leg, another experiment to find the limits of his new body. There was a crunching noise and Steve realized he held the punching bag in one hand, the broken chains dangling from the ceiling.

“You need to work on some of that anger,” Stark remarked.

Steve flung the bag at the wall, noting the complete absence of satisfaction at the sound it made. He sat down on one of the benches, putting his back to the other man.

“Do you know what they did to him?”

“A lot of it, yeah,” Stark said, voice coming closer. He stopped a few feet back and Steve heard the sound of fabric brushing up against the wall. “I asked Coulson to wait on giving you that information, but he thought you needed to know.”

“Damn right I needed to know!”

“Listen, I know we don’t get along the greatest. I know my old man idolized you and it’s kind of looking like you worshiped him too, but this is something you need to think about.”

Stark crossed into his field of vision, leaning against the ropes of the boxing ring. Steve was struck with the knowledge that this truly was Howard Stark’s son. He could see it in the way he looked at Steve, the almost impossible intelligence in his eyes and the sharpness of his gaze. He may have been the man of a different era, maybe even what Howard himself would have been in his place, but someplace deep inside him he held the same goodness that his father had. He only had to choose to use it, and he was trying now.

“There’s no good way to go about this,” Stark said, voice serious, “and it’s complicated. We don’t know that our plan will work. We don’t even know that it won’t make him worse, but we do know that there’s no way you’ll get Barnes back otherwise. He might have flashes, but that thing he does — when he kneels? — he’s basically re-cementing all of his Winter Soldier programming. We’ve run some scans while he does it and you can actually see his brain rewiring itself.”

“What’s so complicated about it?”

“We can’t ask him for permission. Well, we can, but arguments can be made that he’s not in a place to give permission. He’s got no family but you. You need to know this could kill him. It could cure him. It might not do anything. We don’t know.”

“You’re asking me to decide if I want him dead or so screwed up in the head he’s never coming back.”

“He already is that screwed up in the head, Steve.”

He wanted to take offense at that, but he just hung his head. Stark’s voice wasn’t filled with that self-important grandeur the way it usually was. He sounded almost the way he had when they’d thought Coulson was dead.

“I can’t watch that,” Steve said.

Stark shrugged. “We wouldn’t ask you to. Take a break. Go get some, I don’t know, yak milk or something. Be gone for the next three days. Get Barton to dose you with some of that sedative he hasn’t taken out of his pocket since they hauled you off my helicopter. And next time you hide away in a forest, maybe you ought to pick a place a little closer to a landing strip.”

“Can’t stay serious for more than two minutes, can you, Stark?”

“Bad for my health.” Stark straightened, rolling out his shoulders. He looked tired, Steve thought. Drained from too many hours tinkering in a basement. “Think about it. Unless I hear otherwise, we’re going to get started tomorrow morning.”

He was out the door before Steve could say anything. He knew what Stark was doing. If he didn’t say anything, he wasn’t technically giving permission. If things went wrong, he could tell himself that it wasn’t his choice. He didn’t directly lead to Bucky’s death. Twice.

He could have gone and done what Stark suggested. He could have gotten yak milk or ask Coulson for a mission or, if he was feeling particularly masochistic, he could have gone to that ravine where Bucky’s body lay until Erskine dragged him out. Instead he found himself watching as a full forty SHIELD agents, including the brunette that had risen in Coulson’s defense, escorted Bucky into a lab a floor below his cell.


	3. When You Break

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My title for this chapter was something like "Neurotransmitters don't work like that and neither does electricity." This chapter is a little shorter than the others, but Christmas knitting and baking is a lot of work! And if you haven't heard the song from which the chapter title comes, I highly recommend you look it up. It's on the playlist, as well as easily found on YouTube.

Bucky walked with his head down. The restraints on his arms and legs were made of some metal Steve had never seen before, but Bucky never pulled against the bonds. He adjusted his stride to take careful, slow steps, never stretching the metal links to their full length. His arms were loose in front of him, hands curled not quite into fists.

The SHIELD agents pulled aside, opening a path to the chair in the center of the room, a near replica to the one that had been found beneath the bank. The sight of it made Steve’s stomach churn.

Bucky froze. He lifted his head, eyes searching out Steve in the crowd to his side. Steve could feel the betrayal in his face. He had promised Bucky nobody would ever do this to him again, and now he was leading Bucky there himself.

“It’s going to be okay,” Steve said, reaching to touch his arm as he passed.

Bucky jerked away, sending a ripple of alarm through the agents. He picked up his pace and walked straight to the chair, standing in front of it, turning. He held out his wrists, waiting for someone to undo the cuffs.

The agent with the key hesitated and Steve stepped up to take it from her. He slipped the key into the lock, and they clicked open. Nobody moved to catch the shackles, and they fell to the ground, landing with a deep ringing noise. Bucky didn’t seem to hear it. He waited for Steve to unlock the restraints around his ankles and then sat in the chair, leaning back and closing his eyes.

“Respirations increased to 22,” a mechanical voice said. It wasn’t JARVIS and Steve was grateful. He didn’t think he’d be able to hear that voice again without associating it with this. “Blood pressure and pulse rising. 137/76… 155/90…”

“Everyone out,” Stark said, emerging from the control room at the side. “We don’t need everyone watching this. Rogers, still one last chance to get that yak milk.”

Banner blinked at them once, but set about ensuring Bucky was situated while everyone scattered. There wasn’t much for Banner to do. Bucky had settled himself into the chair in a practiced movement. There was enough room for the thick metal to fold over his arms, one on his metal forearm and two on his flesh arm.

“He thinks you’re going to wipe him,” Steve said, watching the tension build in Bucky’s body. He was visibly shaking with strain.

Stark was bent over some displays Steve couldn’t see. “Well, technically that is what we’re doing. I mean, hopefully we’re going to be wiping the other guy out of his head.”

Banner gave a little huff of laughter, straightening from where he had focused on Bucky’s metal arm, checking that the band was wide enough to hold him still.

“Are you saying the Winter Soldier could come out the way Bucky has been?”

“Yeah, well, it’s better that way than this way. Besides, the reason they need to keep wiping him is because the alpha personality, the original, not like alpha dog, keeps reasserting itself. The wipe doesn’t hold on him. Now, I’m not sure if it’s ‘cause there’s something special about Bucky Barnes, or if it’s because the alpha personality will always become the dominant personality in the long run. They’ve been fucking around in his brain quite a bit over the decades, but they’ve also been deep freezing him when they were done with him. That could have affected the wipe’s ability to keep hold on his mind. I don’t know. I don’t do brain tinkering. That’s his job.” Stark jabbed his thumb at Banner.

Banner sighed. “I’m not that kind of doctor, Tony.”

“I’m a nuclear physicist, not a doctor,” Stark said and Steve made a mental note to punch him extra hard the next time one of them got taken over by some sort of mind-controlling alien monster. Extra, extra hard.

“All right,” Banner said, turning his attention to Bucky. “This could hurt a little bit, but probably not as much as you’re used to. Hopefully.” He held out a mouth guard. “Any last questions?”

“Some friends you have, Rogers.”

A dagger in his heart. “It’ll be all right,” Steve said. “Things will look better once this is done.”

Bucky ignored him and accepted the mouth guard, leaning back against the headrest. He looked as though he expected to be hit, cringing when the machine whirred to life. The machinery above his head moved, but stopped a full six inches from touching his head. Bucky’s eyes crinkled in confusion.

A blue light flared on the headgear, but it wasn’t the blue Steve associated with Hydra, but the blue of good, old-fashioned electrical currents. Bucky’s body went tense, hands fisting, nails digging into the padding on the armrests. The metal groaned as he pulled against his restraints, but they held.

Bucky made a sound that was half-groan, half-scream, and Steve took a step in his direction.

Banner threw out a hand. “Don’t touch him. I don’t know what it could do to either of you. Best case scenario, it will knock you both out. Worst case, it could wipe both of your memories completely.”

He stayed still, focusing his gaze instead on where Banner and Stark flitted around control panels and called out numbers and data points.

“How are his vitals?” Stark asked.

“Elevated, but steady. I don’t like the amperage right now.”

“No, no, it’s okay. Hang on, I’ll — There we go.”

“That’s better. What’re his vitals like now?”

Stark made a sound. “165/97. Pulse is 140. It’s high, but not as high as I saw in some of their experiments.”

“It’s higher than I’d like.”

“When we’re done you can get him started on yoga or tai chi or whatever it is you’re doing these days. All right, we’ve reached target levels. Are we ready to move on to stage two?”

“Administering acetylcholine precursors now.”

“L-DOPA administration in three… two… now.” Stark practically skipped to another display. “JARVIS, how are we looking?”

“Everything appears to be progressing as expected, sir. Sergeant Barnes’s body seems to be handling the strain quite well under the circumstances.”

“All right,” Stark said. “Let’s start stage three.”

“How many stages are there?” Steve asked. Bucky was shaking, his knuckles white, and his fingernails had begun cutting into his palms.

“Just three. Everything’s looking goo—oh, shit.”

Before Steve could ask what was happening, Stark threw something at him. Steve caught the shapes without thinking. “Gloves?”

“Put them on, hold him down.”

“I thought you said not to touch him,” Steve said, obeying without thought. The gloves were thin and felt like he was dipping his hands in oil.

“Insulated,” Stark said absently. He was focused on something displayed in front of him. Steve couldn’t read it backwards through the transparent screen, but he grabbed Bucky’s left arm and pressed down. “Whoa. Bruce, look at the numbers this thing is throwing out.”

Stark made a swiping gesture in Banner’s direction. Banner tapped something on the screen and whistled through his teeth. “For World War Two, Soviet-era technology, this is… impressive. This is more than impressive. This is impossible.”

The bands around Bucky’s arm groaned as he shoved up against Steve’s grip. He nearly pulled free, and Steve had to lean most of his weight onto his hands just to keep Bucky’s arm on the armrest.

“I thought you said this would hold him,” Banner said, typing rapidly on one of the screens.

“These are the specs we got! This should do more than hold him. Jesus, I need to take a look at that arm. I don’t know what they did, but that’s incredible. I need to know how he processes feelings through this.”

“Stark. Focus. Please,” Steve said, gritting his teeth as Bucky almost ripped free again.

“Yep, yep, yep. We’re almost done. How are his levels?”

“His adrenaline levels are so high I’m surprised his heart hasn’t stopped,” Banner said. “Dopamine’s leveling out right where we want it. Acetylcholine is still a little low, but we knew that was a possibility.”

“We just need a few more seconds,” Stark said. He looked up at Steve. “Can you hold him?”

Steve was already holding Bucky with everything he had, but he nodded once. “I’ll hold him as long as you need him held. Just hurry.”

Stark had already turned back to his screens. Fifteen seconds later Bucky’s entire body went limp, nearly pitching Steve head-first on top of him. He regained his balance, stepping back for Banner to examine Bucky. He was still breathing, Steve could see that much. His breaths were ragged and entirely too fast, but he was breathing.

“Is he going to be okay?” Steve asked.

He expected some sort of verbal response, a “yes” or a “no” or even an “I don’t know” but Banner looked at him for a few silent seconds. He took his glasses off and rubbed at his temples. He looked aged, Steve realized for the first time. He knew the Hulk wore on him, but this was the first time he noticed just how tired and drained Banner looked. Finally, Banner slipped his glasses back on and shrugged.

“We might have fixed him. We might have wiped him clean and we don’t have James Barnes on a backup disk. There’s no real way of knowing.”

“Let’s get him back to the holding room,” Stark said. He started rolling a stretcher toward the chair, but Steve shook his head.

“Can you…?” He gestured to the bands on Bucky’s arms.

Tony keyed in a code and the restraints hissed open. There were red lines on Bucky’s right arm, but no broken flesh aside from his palm. Steve bent to pick Bucky up, slipping a hand beneath his knees, but Bucky stirred, a hand pushing at Steve’s shoulder.

“I can walk.”

“Bucky?” Steve asked, pulling back to look at him.

Bucky didn’t seem to recognize him, or even to see him. He waited until Steve moved far enough back from the chair to give him room to stand and swung his legs over the edge. He shoved himself up and teetered, stumbling forward. Steve caught him, slinging Bucky’s arm over his shoulder. It felt familiar. He could almost imagine himself back in Europe before everything happened. Except this didn’t feel like Bucky walking next to him. He was silent, stumbling over his own feet. He never once asked Steve why he was so damned tall or where they were or why they were there.

If Stark surprised the SHIELD agents at all when he shoved the door open, none of them showed it. Half of them led the way to the elevator, the other half falling in behind. Only ten situated themselves inside with Steve, Bucky, Stark, and Banner, and walked with them the rest of the way to the tiny cell in which Bucky had been living for the past few weeks.

Bucky had regained enough of his strength to walk into his cell unassisted, but not much more than that. He staggered through the entryway and fell to his knees at the corner of his bed. He didn’t move for three days.

Steve watched him for each of those three days, the steady rise and fall of his chest, the way his eyes didn’t flick beneath his eyelids, the rare twitch of fingertips. By the third day, he couldn’t take it any longer.

He managed, through Natasha and Stark, to secure a meeting with Fury. Most of the “securing” involved Natasha and Stark finding out which secret meeting Fury was supposed to be at and when it was, then Steve telling the agents stationed outside the door that if they didn’t move, he would be forced to move them. Either they remembered what happened to the Strike Team and decided to relocate or they figured tiffs between the Avengers and Fury weren’t within their pay grade.

Steve shoved the door open without knocking. “Bucky is coming with me,” he announced, coming to a halt in front of Fury’s table. All the chairs were filled with holographic people. And that was something he absolutely couldn’t get used to.

“You will excuse me,” Fury said. It wasn’t a question and the people in the chairs flickered out of existence one by one. Fury waited until the last one disappeared before he looked at Steve, single eye impassive. “Or what?”

“Or I take him,” Steve said. “For every step I’d taken with him in the Ukraine, you’ve knocked him back two. I’m not letting you break him any more. I am taking Bucky with me.”

“You ever think he might already be broken, Cap? That maybe you can’t fix him?”

“It’s a chance I’m willing to take.”

Fury pressed his hands onto the table and stood up. “That’s not a chance I can take.”

“With all due respect, sir, I’m not giving you a choice. You can give me permission and I can stay with him in my quarters in the Tower, or you can refuse me and I will take him.”

“And if he tries to kill you?” Fury asked. “How do I explain to people that Captain America is dead because a known Russian assassin was able to trick everyone into trusting him? We don’t know their programming is gone or that ours stuck.”

“Yeah, uh, about that.” Stark sauntered into the room, taking a bite out of an apple as he walked. He waved flippantly at Steve as he passed and dropped down into a chair, swinging his feet up onto the table. “Our program — that kill switch you wanted? — just wasn’t feasible. We didn’t dare trigger any existing programming.” Stark wiggled the index finger of the hand holding the apple near his temple. “It’s like installing an anti-virus when you’ve already got one running. Everything’s truckin’ along just fine until they realize the other one’s there and then—” Stark flung the apple toward the nearest wall, past Fury’s head, with an almost casual gesture. The apple splattered, chunks flying off in all directions. “Bad things happen.”

“You let him go without any programming?”

“We let him go without any programming that was more likely to kill him than the procedure itself. Now, I don’t know about you, but from experience, I start to get a little woozy after three days without anything to eat or drink. I’m sure our Super Soldiers here have a stronger constitution than us mere mortals, but I bet even he’s getting thirsty.”

Fury fixed Stark with a look that Steve was sure would make Stark beat a quick retreat. The self-proclaimed genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist gave him a bland look in return.

“He doesn’t leave the tower,” Fury said. He still had his gaze fixed on Stark, so it took Steve a second to realize Fury was talking to him.

“No, sir.”

“He will be monitored constantly.”

“Vitals only when he’s in my quarters.”

That glare moved to him. “Then we monitor both your vitals when he’s with you. Brain scans weekly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay,” Fury said. “Go ahead.”

“I — What?” Steve had been prepared to keep arguing and Fury’s words caught him off-guard.

“You heard me,” Fury said. “Go ahead, and let me get back to my meeting.”

Steve didn’t wait for Fury to sit down before he was out the door. The agent waiting at the top floor had already been notified. She held out a small box of dark metal that rattled slightly when she moved it and a gray fob key.

“He’s been cuffed for you, Captain, and is awaiting transport.”

Steve took the key and box. At his questioning look, she added, “His belongings. They scoured the clearing while they were collecting the two of you. This was all they could find.”

Surprised Bucky had had even that much, Steve nodded his thanks to her and decided not to be offended when she hurried for the elevator just a bit faster than necessary.

Steve swiped the fob across the lock, still a little awed by the technology as it clicked open. Tucking the box beneath one arm, he pushed the door open and stepped into the room. Bucky was kneeling by the corner of his bed, the cuffs wrapping from wrist to forearm made of a dark metal Steve had never seen before. The barrier between the two of them sank silently beneath the floor.

“Bucky?” Steve asked. No response. He stepped across the thin line on the floor, waiting for some kind of reaction. Before all of this, back in the clearing at the beginning, Bucky would have at least flinched away. As much as that hurt, it was better than nothing. “Fury’s letting you come with me. You can stay in my apartment, just like the old days. But with more running water, heat, and electricity.”

Bucky didn’t say anything, but he climbed to his feet. The handcuffs clinked as he moved, walking to a point a few inches off Steve’s left shoulder and stopping, head down. He followed Steve meekly to the door and into the elevator. He hesitated only when the door to Sleeping Quarters Six hissed open, assaulting their eyes with patriotism, but he stepped through.


	4. Brothers on a Hotel Bed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took me so long to get up! Christmas played havoc with my editing schedule and, as there is no internet at my family's, I didn't even bother bringing my computer. Chapters will resume regular posting on Mondays and Thursdays. Title again comes from my [playlist](http://open.spotify.com/user/129150009/playlist/1ewF2sYM7mD9b9RoMYplsA). Keep up with updates on my tumblr, fangirlingtendencies.

Steve led the way through the mess of red, white, and blue into his kitchen. He set the box of Bucky’s belongings on the table and spotted the folder on the counter. He hurried to pick it up, shoving it into the nearest drawer, which happened to hold his eating utensils. Grimacing at the clattering of the cutlery, Steve turned back to pass the fob key across a blinking red light on Bucky’s cuffs. They unlocked with a hydraulic click. Steve caught them and tossed them onto the kitchen table.

Bucky rubbed absently at his wrists, but otherwise kept still.

“Are you hungry?” Steve asked, casting around blindly for something to talk about.

Bucky lifted his eyes to Steve’s and finally nodded. “Yes,” he said. The voice didn’t even sound like his.

“What do you want?”

Bucky shrugged, hands spreading helplessly. “I don’t know.”

Steve realized what he had done and sighed, gesturing toward the kitchen table. “Go ahead and sit down.”

He pulled open his fridge as Bucky slid a chair out, dreading to have to cook, and found his fridge had been stripped of ingredients and filled with containers labeled in Natasha’s precise hand. He hoped Natasha hadn’t actually cooked all this. She was a woman of many skills, but cooking was not necessarily one of them. Cacciatore, chicken parmesan, Szechwan shrimp, tortilla soup, lasagna, smothered pork chops, stroganoff, lentil soup, and that was just the labels he could see. Having no idea what cacciatore was, and as it was nearest his hand, he pulled two servings of that out and stuck it in the microwave.

Steve reached for the box on the counter as the microwave whirred behind him. He held it out. Bucky reached out to take it. “The agent said it’s your belongings. They probably took any weapons out of it.”

Bucky sat, holding the box, but making no move to open it. The microwave beeped and Steve glanced at it. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Bucky stiffen, his face flattening immediately into impassivity. It was the same hyper-vigilance he’d seen on so many other soldiers, tempered by lifetimes of Soviet training.

Steve pretended he didn’t see it, pulling out forks and dumping the reheated food onto plates. He ran tap water into glasses for both of them and sat across from Bucky. They ate in silence.

Despite his hunger, and he had to have been starving, Bucky ate slowly, taking precise, small bites. Steve finished before him, putting his dishes in the dishwasher. He was really, really fond of that invention. When Bucky finished he stayed sitting, uncertain, staring at the center of Steve’s table. Steve claimed his dishes as well and then dusted his hands, putting an exaggerated smile on his face.

“I’ll give you the grand tour. You can stay in the guest room, and you have free rein of the place to do as you please.”

Bucky stood, silent, and folded his hands in front of him, eyes downcast. Steve bit off a sigh before he could give sound to it. This wasn’t Bucky’s fault. It was Zola and the Soviet Union and Russian winters.

Steve stepped into the hallway that lead from the kitchen. Directly across from the kitchen was a massive living room with a huge TV dominating one wall, a fireplace, a bookshelf, a full audio system, a coffee table of some dark wood that Steve thought probably cost more than the electronics, and leather couches. A large window took up most of the wall on the far side of the room, although Steve kept the shades down most of the time. Stark called him paranoid and said that even if anyone could get close without his security noticing, it would take something stronger than a rocket launcher to break through that glass.

Continuing down the hallway, Steve pointed out the linen closet, washer and dryer, and small bathroom. The bathroom was small only compared to the other two bathrooms in Steve’s apartment. It was fully equipped and had a shower easily three times the size of any Steve had used and somehow the bathroom was always stocked with fluffy (blue) towels Steve knew he had never put there.

“This is your room,” Steve said, pushing the next door open. The room held a king bed, closet, bedside table, and dresser, but it was large enough that even then it seemed sparsely furnished. “That door leads to your bathroom. It should have everything you need, but anything else should be in the linen closet. If you want something in particular, just let me know and I can have someone pick it up for you.”

On the opposite side of the hallway just a little further down was Steve’s room. He opened that door and let Bucky follow him in. It was the same as Bucky’s room, although even larger. Steve had added a bookshelf to try to take up some of the space, but it still seemed empty.

“If you need anything just come and get me. Wake me up if you have to, okay?”

Bucky nodded listlessly. For lack of anything better to do, Steve led them back into the living room. He headed to one of the couches and Bucky hesitated in the doorway, looking around like this was some sort of trap. Finally, Bucky took the chair in the corner; the one with the clear view of the hallway and the window. It was the same one Steve himself had chosen when he was still uncomfortable in the tower.

“Bucky,” Steve said, leaning forward. Bucky looked over at him, eyes blank. “What do you remember?”

“Flashes. Munitions and falling and… and your face.”

“Do you remember anything else? Who you are?”

“Bucky Barnes,” he answered. It didn’t feel like someone giving there name, there was no familiarity, no knowledge or intimacy. It was like someone reading a name of a slip of paper.

“Do you want to take a look at the box?”

Bucky glanced down at the box as though just remembering that he held it. With a shrug, he flicked the lid open and offered it to Steve. Like he’d predicted, the knives Steve had seen in the forest clearing were gone, although the empty sheathes were still there. Steve handed them to Bucky, who turned them over in his hands. Bucky frowned, pressing a finger against a point where the synthetic fabric had given away.

“These were mine.”

Bucky closed his hand above the sheath as though grabbing at a knife. His grip closed on air, but that didn’t seem to matter. He was staring off into the distance, eyes unfocused as though looking at something only he could see. He whispered something in Russian, something quiet enough that Steve couldn’t pick out enough of it to ask Natasha later. His eyes focused again, zeroed in on Steve’s face.

For a second the Winter Soldier was in his eyes again, cold and razor-sharp. He blinked and it was gone. The person next to him wasn’t Bucky, not quite, but it was a shade closer.

Steve pulled the next item out of the box. It was a book, the front cover lined with steel the way the Bibles they gave to the soldiers during WWII used to be, but with Cyrillic lettering. It didn’t look much like a Bible, not that the Soviets had been big on Bibles anyway. It was smaller, maybe thirty pages. Some of them looked to have bloodstains.

Bucky set it immediately down on the table beside the sheaths, pulling back as though it was dangerous. Whatever memories were associated with the book, they clearly weren’t anything good.

The third item was a black rag. It wasn’t until Bucky took it that Steve realized it had been a gun rag. He held it like a soldier held a flag, like a child held a safety blanket. He bowed his head over it, clutching it so tightly that the fingers on his right hand turned white. Some part of Steve had to marvel at the programming that had gone into the metal arm, because it could have shredded the cloth, but the fabric only crinkled in his grasp.

Bucky let out a shaking breath, the first sign of true emotion Steve had seen since they’d tried to wipe the Winter Soldier out of his mind. There was something there, something beyond the programming. It would come out; Steve had to believe that it would. Bucky set the cloth on top of the book, covering the stamped lettering on the metal cover.

“There’s one thing left,” Steve said, trying not to taste the bitterness of those words. Two lifetimes and Bucky carried four personal items. “Do you want to see it?”

Bucky nodded, eyes still black cloth. He looked at Steve when the paper he was drawing from the box crinkled. It was darkened with soot and some bits of it had burnt.

Bucky took the crumpled paper and unfolded it carefully, smoothing it onto the table. Steve recognized it even though the smudging, the mountains and German tanks, six blank faces still somehow managing to stare at him, accusing. He hadn’t finished them. He’d left them behind.

“Dum Dum,” Bucky said, pointing at the empty face beneath a bowler hat. He moved his hand to a pair standing together, one with darker shading around the edges, although the rest of the face still remained featureless. “Jones and Dernier.” To one with a semi-automatic strapped across his chest. “Morita.” A carefully sketched and shaded beret. “Falsworth.” Finally to the figure in the foreground. “You’re missing.”

“I’m not going to forget me,” Steve said. “It was the rest of you that I’m afraid I’m going to forget.”

“I think I remember them,” Bucky said, passing his hand across the picture again, from face to face. “Their voices. I don’t know their faces.”

Steve reached for the laptop resting on the corner of the table to call up some pictures of the Howling Commandos, at least as history remembered them. “There’s an exhibit at the Smithsonian. I can’t take you right now, but maybe later—”

Bucky’s hand was still pressed to the drawing, eyes downcast. On impulse, Steve reached past the laptop and picked up his box of drawing supplies. The charcoals weren’t the same as the ones he’d used in the forest that day, but the whole picture was ruined already. He would draw a better one later.

Steve slid the paper from beneath Bucky’s hand, starting on Dum Dum on the far left side of the drawing. “It took me three hours of straight drinking to get him to tell him his real name. I’m surprised he got it all out, drunk as he was. Timothy Aloysius Cadwallader Dugan. You and he got on real well, even from the start.”

He talked as he drew, letting himself believe that the horns he heard down below were the sound of wildlife and the whoosh of the recirculated air was wind in the trees. He and Bucky were alone again in the forest.

He told Bucky stories of Dernier and Jones when they spent that week alone in Paris, of Morita flirting with Carter and how jealous Steve had been when she laughed, and how Falsworth owed Bucky five dollars after Carter turned Morita down in the end. Of Stark and Dum Dum spending nights with their heads over some new design that Steve suspected wasn’t of armor or weapon.

Steve finished drawing Bucky in last, the way he remembered him, with his hair cropped short and his body whole and unmarred. A last addition, a way to fit into a scene in which he hadn’t left room for himself, Steve sketched his shield resting against Bucky’s shin. They were quick drawings, without the accuracy of comparing it to a picture, but they were close enough for anyone to recognize.

He handed the picture over. Bucky took it in his right hand, looking at it as reverently as he had the gun cloth.

“I’ll make you a better one later,” Steve offered. “The composition isn’t quite right in this one. And it started on fire.”

Bucky had fixated on the picture of himself, a finger just barely touching his left shoulder, right where a red star was painted on the one he had now. “I was real, once.”

“You are real,” Steve said, reaching out to touch Bucky’s forearm. Bucky flinched away. “Bucky, you are real. We’ll get this figured out. Your memories will come back. At least Stark thinks so, and he’s an asshole, but he’s smart. If he says you will remember, I know that you will.”

Bucky’s lips twisted into a sad mockery of a smile. It may have been a grimace caught before it could begin to show real emotion. The Winter Soldier didn’t have emotion. The Winter Soldier wasn’t a person. He was a tool, a weapon in someone’s belt.

“I would—” Bucky stopped and swallowed, fighting to bring words out. “I would like to sleep.”

“Okay,” Steve said, acknowledging that asking for something, making a decision for himself, was something that would take Bucky some time to come to terms with. “I’m going to ask a couple people to swing by tonight, so don’t be worried if you hear voices.”

Bucky slid the gun cloth, book, and empty sheaths into the box, face gone blank. He kept the drawing in his right hand. Once Bucky closed the door to his room and Steve heard the shower start up, he raised his voice to speak.

“JARVIS?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is Natasha?”

“She is in her room, sir. Would you like me to direct a call to her?”

“Can you ask her to come here?”

A pause. “She will be there momentarily, sir.”

“Thank you, JARVIS.”

“Of course, sir.”

The room fell silent. Steve had the uncomfortable sensation of being watched, but he knew Stark wouldn’t spy on them without good reason. Probably. Steve glanced around the ceiling as though he would even be able to see the spy gear. Before he had time to convince himself to begin looking through books, a quiet chime sounded through the apartment.

Steve went to the entranceway, grimacing again at the color scheme, and let Natasha in. She was dressed casually for a night in, jeans and a t-shirt, with her hair clipped back out of her face. She didn’t look winded, quite, but Steve got the sense that she had come as soon as he called.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked, peering through the open door into the kitchen.

“He’s showering,” Steve said. “And going to bed.”

“At three?” Natasha asked, raising an eyebrow.

“When was the last time he slept?” Steve countered, turning to lead the way into the kitchen. He took a step into the hallway and checked to make sure the door to Bucky’s room was still closed, not that that necessarily meant Bucky wouldn’t overhear. He closed the door leading to the kitchen.

Natasha was sitting backwards on a chair, resting her elbows on the backrest and waiting for Steve to talk. It was the most relaxed he’d seen her in days. Steve took a breath and sat on the chair on the other side of the island.

“I have a question for you. Can I trust you not to share this with Fury or Coulson? Or Stark?” He didn’t bother asking her not to tell Barton. Those two were part and parcel and there was no point pretending otherwise.

Natasha shrugged, face gone serious. “Is this the kind of question that’s going to get us all killed?”

“No,” Steve said. “Or, I don’t think so, anyway.”

“‘I don’t think so,’” Natasha echoed wryly, but she nodded. “As long as this isn’t going to get anyone killed, I’m all yours.”

“When I was with him in the Ukraine—”

“I think they just call it Ukraine, now.”

“—he spoke a lot of Russian. He repeated two phrases.”

“And you want a translation.”

“The first was ‘Ya ne pomnyu.’”

“Your accent is atrocious,” Natasha said.

“Nat, please.”

She sighed, pursing her lips. “Ya ne pomnyu,” and hearing her say it, he realized his accent really was atrocious, “means ‘I don’t remember.’”

“Proshu proshsheniya.”

“It means ‘I’m sorry.’ You know what was done to him.”

“Some of it. Some of it… Nat, I couldn’t even read all of it. How did he survive?”

Most people would have given him some sort of pitying look, but Natasha’s face was blasé. “He survived because he had to. Same as you, same as me, same as Clint or Tony or Bruce. We survive because we can’t give in. You’ll get through to him?”

“Will I?”

Natasha kicked him under the table. Super soldier serum or not, Steve grimaced. “Yes. I don’t know how you lived so long being so blind, Cap, but the way he looks at you… Even not knowing which way is up, he looks at you like you’re his savior, like you’re his lodestar.”

“Last time he looked at me, he called me a traitor.”

“My transition to SHIELD wasn’t as smooth as some people think,” Natasha said, drumming her fingers on the table. “First time Clint tried to recruit me, I told him if I ever saw him again, I would shoot him. His orders were to put me down and as good as I am… I was in a bad place, Cap. It wouldn’t have been so hard for him to do it, if he’d wanted. He tracked me down the next day and I went with him, figured I could sell SHIELD for something someday.” Natasha shrugged, feigning disinterest. “I tried to sell them. I got good people killed. They sent Clint after me again. Third time. Told him if he didn’t come back with a confirmed kill, it would be the end of his time with SHIELD. He came back with me alive. I know what it is to be a traitor, Steve, and what you did isn’t it.”

Natasha swung her leg over the chair and stood up. She settled her hand on his shoulder; he reached up and patted her hand absently.

“You’ll be okay. Both of you. Call me if you need anything; Clint probably thinks Bucky’s gone crazy and killed us by now.”

“Thanks, Nat,” Steve said.

“Any time, Cap.”

Steve pulled himself to his feet long enough to walk her to the door. He considered asking JARVIS where Sam was. He knew a little about PTSD, some of the warning signs, but he figured Bucky was going to be a unique case. Eventually he decided the thought of having another conversation was too draining, and he dragged himself to his living room, stretching out on the couch and reaching for the TV remote.

He wasn’t one for taking naps, but either he had taken a nap or several hours passed between blinks. While it wouldn’t have been the strangest thing that happened to him in his life, he thought it probably wasn’t lost time.

Steve heated up a bowl of lentil soup and forced down a few bites. The soup was delicious, probably a Bruce Banner creation, but his appetite seemed to have deserted him. He dumped the bowl out in the garbage disposal, part of him flinching a little at the waste, and tossed the bowl in the dishwasher. He would check on Bucky and go to bed. He didn’t need to sleep, especially with that nap, but it was that or pace the living room until Bucky woke up.

Part of him expected the creaking of the door to wake Bucky, but he didn’t expect to find the bed empty. The pillow and blankets were gone and for one heart-stopping moment, Steve remembered some of the men in the barracks, the ones who couldn’t handle what they’d seen. Most of them chose their guns, but some had— No, Bucky was lying on the floor beside the bed, beneath a pile of blankets. He was breathing — sharp, erratic breaths — but still breaths.

Bucky tossed to one side, Russian spilling from his lips, words and phrases Steve knew he would never remember.

Steve knew better than to get within reach of that metal arm, but he did it anyway. “Bucky? Buck, it’s me.”

He reached for Bucky, fingers just skimming the cool metal of his shoulder, and found a hand wrapped around his throat. Bucky’s eyes were open and wild. His grip was tight enough that Steve knew he had to be very, very careful with what he did next.

“Bucky,” Steve said, voice rasping through his throat. “Bucky, can you hear me?”

Bucky looked at him, saw him, and pulled back, horror blossoming on his face. He pulled back, pressing against the bedframe. “I— Steve? What did—? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Steve said, forcing himself not to grimace at the ache in his throat. “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have woken you up like that.”

Bucky reached to touch Steve’s neck with his right hand and something in Bucky’s eyes dulled. Steve wanted to bring it back. He wanted the light, the recognition, the sense that Bucky was still in this body that trudged through the hours without him.

“Are you okay?” Steve asked.

Bucky nodded, resettling himself on his knees, hands resting on his thighs. Steve bit back a curse, choosing instead to put his hand on Bucky’s hand, his left one. This was Bucky now. There was no difference between his arms, no reason to prefer one over the other.

“Do you remember me?”

“Captain Steve Rodgers,” Bucky said, voice barely above a whisper. “Mission number—” He cut off so quickly he made a strangled sound. “Mission…” He looked up, hopelessly confused. “You told me to go on without you. Fire, and you told me to run.”

“I can get you something to sleep,” Steve said, helpless. “Something that will…”

“I don’t want to be wiped again,” Bucky said. His shoulders slumped, head falling forward. “Please, don’t wipe me again. I lose everything.”

“We’re not going to wipe you. You will never have to sit in that chair again. I’ll have it destroyed, every one like it. We’ll erase the plans, burn any building that has them. They’ll never do that to you again.”

Bucky breathed deeply, back straightening, and he was gone. He looked over Steve’s shoulder. Steve pulled back.

“If you get hungry, you can reheat anything out of the fridge. I’ll be in my room if you need anything.”

Bucky didn’t react.

Steve tossed and turned in bed for half an hour before he heard footsteps in the hall and his door swung open. A hand pulled the blankets back and Bucky slipped into bed with him, cool shoulder pressing into the middle of Steve’s back. The temperature change should have been shocking, but Bucky’s familiar presence actually soothed him. He considered pretending to be asleep, but he realized that whether or not the Winter Soldier had been wiped from Bucky’s mind, the training was still there. Bucky made the decision for him.

“You slept better with me beside you,” Bucky said. He sounded confused, the way he always did when remembering things. “I did, too.”

“You’ll remember,” Steve said, sleep finally rising up to meet him.


	5. Awakening

Steve slept better than he had since waking up from a block of ice in a city he should have known. Bucky was still beside him and didn’t stir while Steve rose carefully from the bed and headed to the bathroom to shower. The bedroom was empty when Steve came back out, but the soft sound of the television drew him into the living room.

Bucky had dressed in the clothes SHIELD had left for him, the dark blue fabric they used in almost all of their uniforms, but of a looser, more casual cut. He spared a glance for Steve and then went back to looking at the massive television screen, bewildered. Steve looked at the show and groaned.

“ _Breaking Amish_? You could watch anything in the entirety of history and you choose _Breaking Amish_?”

A muffled clatter from the kitchen drew Steve’s attention. Barton stuck his head through the door, grinning at Steve. “I wasn’t going to let you introduce him to reality television. You’d probably have him watching CSPAN and telling him how important it was to be aware of what your government is voting on.”

“I wouldn’t make him watch CSPAN,” Steve protested. “And it is important to know what your government is voting on.” He was a little confused how, in the span of time it took him to shower and dress, Bucky got up, dressed, let Barton in, and, apparently, Barton had started cooking breakfast.

“You spent three hours the first time you found it, staring at the TV,” Natasha said, nudging Barton aside. “Your eggs are burning.”

Barton disappeared back toward the kitchen. Natasha settled herself on the floor in front of the couch and crossed her legs, frowning as one of the characters made a snide remark about women. She opened her mouth to say something, but the entryway door slammed and he heard Pepper’s voice.

“Take it through there. Careful, please. We don’t want to break anything of Captain America’s, do we?” Two men carrying a huge table tromped into Steve’s living room and deposited it against the wall. Pepper followed them in, directing another man with a stack of chairs. “Good morning, Steve. Yes, that’s fine right there. Thank you. Tell Tony we’ll expect him soon. Oh, what are you watching?”

“ _Breaking Amish_ ,” Steve said, glancing at Bucky and finding him confused but not agitated. “What’s going on?”

“I thought it would be a good time for Bucky to meet all of us without dealing with SHIELD agents in the cafeteria,” Natasha said very casually. So casually that Steve didn’t dare argue with her.

“When you say all of us…”

“Clint is cooking breakfast. We left a message for Thor, and Tony is on his way.”

At that Steve did shoot her a look. Having the son of one of their friends, specifically one that Bucky had assassinated, might not have been her most brilliant plan. Pepper put her hand on Steve’s elbow, catching his attention.

“He’s under orders to be on his best behavior. There are a couple very important press conferences coming up. If he doesn’t behave, he knows he’ll be responsible for them. And they’re important enough that he really can’t blow these ones off.”

There was a hesitant tap at the door and a few seconds later, Banner came in, shirt rumpled and with his constant air of vague confusion.

“Good morning, Cap.”

“Hello, Dr. Banner,” Steve said, resigning himself to the fact that Natasha had clearly decided this was happening, and there wasn’t much to be done when she made up her mind.

“Do you mind if I steal Bucky from you for a few minutes?” Banner asked. “I’d like to speak with him.”

Bucky looked up at Banner, variegated expressions flitting across his face, and stood, hands rigidly behind his back. Banner gestured down the hallway and the two of them walked away. Steve stared after them so intently that he jumped when Natasha grabbed his wrist and jerked him back to fall onto the sofa.

“Doc can handle him,” Natasha said. “How was last night?”

Steve couldn’t think of a way to say ‘we slept together’ without her taking it completely out of context. “He’s confused. He does his best and he remembers things sometimes, but most of the time he’s just so confused. He’s worse than me when I first woke up. He hardly knows who he is. How do you leave a message for Thor?”

Natasha tapped her ear, where her communicator was conspicuously absent. “He’s got one, special upgrade. It’s supposed to be able to send messages through to him, but it doesn’t always work.”

The kitchen door opened again, depositing both Stark and Thor, as though summoned by their conversation. Pepper clapped her hands briskly.

“Excellent timing. Tony, Thor, if you would help me set up this table.”

Stark opened his mouth, but thought better of it. He started to stand to help them, but Thor gripped the table in one hand and held it up. Steve sat back down.

“Showoff,” Stark grumbled, crouching and unhooking the legs. After Stark got out of the way, Thor shook the table once and the legs clicked into place. He set it down in the middle of the room.

“Hello, Captain Rogers,” Thor said, voice booming in the suddenly filled space of Steve’s living room.

Steve hardly had time to respond. Natasha turned off the TV and people were flowing toward the table, setting up chairs. Bucky and Banner returned, Banner heading toward the kitchen and joining Barton and Natasha as they carried arm-loads of food.

Stark steered Steve toward a seat while Pepper encouraged Bucky to take a seat beside him. Bucky looked less confused, although not at all comfortable with the situation. He looked like somebody at a family reunion with people they hadn’t seen in years.

Stark, of course, took the head of the table, Pepper between him and Steve. Bucky looked more comfortable when Banner sat at his other side, at the end of the table, and Barton across from him as he laid out the last plate of food. Natasha took the seat on Barton’s other side and Thor took the last seat.

“Oladyi?” Natasha asked, reaching for a plate of what looked like small pancakes. “Clint, you made oladyi?”

“There’s kasha down there,” Banner said, pointing. “I’m not sure if it’s right. Everything I read was ‘it can be sweet or not’; ‘it can be thick or thin.’”

“We’ve got a couple different kinds of sausages and Tony ponied up for caviar, but I thought you’d probably be the one one who wanted raw fish eggs for breakfast,” Barton said. “For those of you with less exotic tastes, Bruce prepared rava idli, congee, and canjeero. And for the rest of us, hashbrowns, bacon, eggs benedit, scrambled, over easy, and hard-boiled, french toast, pancakes, toast with three kinds of jelly and two kinds of jam. We’ve got coffee, water, and orange juice to drink.”

“When did you decide we were having a breakfast party?” Steve asked.

Natasha gave him a blinding smile and dropped two oladyi on her plate, reaching for the small dish of caviar. “It’s been a long time since we all had a meal together. I thought it was a good chance for Bucky to get to know all of us.”

“And we know our Widow doesn’t do anything halfway,” Stark said, snatching the caviar back from her after she’d dished some onto her plate. He nudged Pepper with an elbow and nodded toward Bucky.

Bucky was staring at the table of food and the gathering of people around it as though he’d never seen anything like it. Or, Steve realized, like he was trying to remember where he’d seen it before.

This _was_ a good way to introduce Bucky to the rest of the team, Steve thought. This was the closest he was going to get to the kind of camaraderie he’d had before falling from the train. Steve didn’t know if they would all ever truly trust one another; there had been too many near-misses and too many secret pasts, but they had moments when Steve could almost imagine they would.

Pepper picked up the plate of pancakes and passed them into Steve’s hands. “Don’t you think Bucky might like some of these?” An assortment of syrups followed. Natasha passed the kasha and oladyi with caviar in his direction.

Before long, and with some help, the variety of food on Bucky’s plate rivaled that on Thor’s. As the last of the dishes settled into their places on the table, everyone settled into an uneasy silence.

“What is Jane up to these days?” Pepper asked, breaking the silence in a way that somehow didn’t seem forced.

“She is working on a new use of our soul forges,” Thor said, shoving a bite of sausage into his mouth. “The healers of Asgard tired to use a soul forge to heal her, once.” A fond smile lit up his face as he spoke. “She insisted it was a quantum field generator.”

Stark perked up at that. “You have access to quantum field generators?”

“Soul forges,” Thor said. “You will have to ask her what she plans with this field generator of hers.”

“When will we get to meet her?” Natasha asked, taking a sip of her coffee and gesturing to Steve to begin eating. He obeyed without thought, digging into the sausage-and-cheese stuffed hashbrowns that filled his plate.

“I will inform her you wish to meet her,” Thor proclaimed. He seemed to proclaim everything. “She will be pleased, although she will likely bring young Darcy with her.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve watched Bucky eat. He ate slowly, in careful bites, and he never took the first bite of anything. The oladyi he began to eat after Natasha had devoured one of hers. He ate some of the scrambled eggs after Banner ate a ketchup-slathered forkful of his. Steve didn’t think anyone else noticed as the conversation moved from Jane Foster to Coulson’s cellist to exactly how many instruments Natasha could play, but finally the only thing left untouched on Bucky’s plate was the kasha. Both Stark and Banner had taken some of the porridge, but both men were in the middle of a debate that Pepper was monitoring about the merits of some form of theoretical radiation, so her kasha had likewise been ignored.

In the middle of a conversation with Barton about the relative merits of a gun versus a bow, Natasha reached for the bowl of kasha and spooned some onto her plate. She never broke her conversation, taking a few bites. Bucky finished off the last of the food on his plate and sat watching the conversations around him.

“Rogers, settle a debate for us,” Stark said suddenly, gesturing between himself and Pepper.

Steve glanced toward him, lifting his eyebrows. “Yes?”

“In 1945—”

“I spent most of 1945 unconscious,” Steve reminded him.

“Okay, in early 1945, the women were all polite and demure, right?”

Steve laughed. “Why? Do you want your women all polite and demure?”

“What would be the fun in that? Answer the question.”

“No. Well, some of ‘em were,” Steve said. “But most of the women I met in 1945 were in war offices on the front lines. Tough as nails and twice as scary as any officer I ever served under.”

Pepper’s grin was victorious. “See, Tony? Traveling back in time is not a way to keep yourself out of trouble with women.”

“I never said _I_ would travel back in time,” Stark said, taking a gulp of coffee. “I said bringing people forward in time.”

“So you’ve figured out the mechanics of time travel, then?” Banner asked, passing a plate somehow still full of hashbrowns Thor’s direction.

Stark shrugged. “How hard can it be?”

Somehow they finished off most of the food on the table and everyone trickled away, sending most of the leftovers home with Thor, whose fascination with Earth food was notorious within SHIELD. Barton and Natasha carried the table out, and Pepper supervised the removal of the chairs. After one of the more confusing mornings of Steve’s life, and that included the one when he woke up in a replica of 1940s New York, he and Bucky were finally alone in his living room.

Bucky seemed less tense now than he had before everyone else showed up. As much as Steve wished Natasha had at least run this one past him before she invited all of the Avengers into his living room, it seemed to have worked, at least partially.

“You okay?” Steve asked, settling himself on the couch in the hope that Bucky would stop standing in the middle of his living room. “They can be overwhelming at first. What did Banner talk to you about?”

“He apologized,” Bucky said, face twisting in confusion as he sat in the chair he’d taken the previous night. “I think I remember others…” He put on a heavy Russian accent, “‘I am sorry for what we have to do to you, but it is for the best.’ But I… I don’t know.”

“Buck…”

“The lights in Steve’s apartment flashed green and Steve bit back the desire to curse. In other sections of the tower, alarms began to ring. “I’ve got to go. SHIELD needs us. I—”

“Captain Rogers,” JARVIS’s voice said, “you are needed urgently. I will keep you updated on Sergeant Barnes’s condition.”

Bucky nodded and gestured for him to go. He arrived in the briefing room at the same time as Barton. They were the last to arrive and Fury began speaking as soon as the door closed behind them. “There’s been a HYDRA attack in Brooklyn. They’ve taken hostages in your old neighborhood, Cap.”

“Don’t they know we just ate?” Stark asked.

Fury ignored him. “We’ve got the jet fueled and ready to go. Free the hostages, take anyone you can.”

The mission was as straight-forward as any of their missions got. Natasha and Steve dropped in through the ceiling while Banner and Stark made a mess out front. Thor cut out their electrical systems with an incredibly accurate series of lightning strikes, during which Natasha smiled like a proud parent. Barton covered their exit and they managed to get the seven hostages out through the back door as Thor trapped two of the HYDRA agents in a closet by placing his hammer in front of the door.

It only took them an hour from the first alarms to get to the building and rescue the hostages, but one of the escaping HYRDA agents had started a fire to cover his escape and it took them a further three hours to make sure everyone was out of the building and help the firefighters. The firefighters did most of the hard work at that point, but it was safer to send in an Avenger than a firefighter.

In the initial fight, a HYDRA agent had managed to hit Steve in the head with a brick as he entered. It had been a glancing blow, but his head still ached. Five hours after leaving the Avengers Tower, they finally made it back, and Steve had no plans beyond going back to his quarters, showering, maybe eating, and falling into bed.

They all separated to their respective rooms, drained, and nobody looked twice at Steve as he walked. As such, it didn’t occur to him what he must have looked like when he walked into his living room.

Bucky looked up at him, all four of his belongings spread out before him, and jumped to his feet as soon as he saw Steve. He took an aborted step forward, then fell still. Steve frowned and lifted his shield, looking at his reflection in the unpainted silver. He had dried, smeared blood on his forehead and in his hair from the brick, and his face was covered in soot and grime.

“I’m fine,” Steve said, lowering the shield. “There was a fire.”

At the sound of his voice, Bucky walked to him and stopped just within arm’s reach, staring at his face. He touched Steve’s cheek and his temple, the places he’d been wounded when he was pulled out of the Potomac. That confusion was back on Bucky’s face, the look that Steve was beginning to recognize as a sign that the memory was there, he was just trying to find it.

He looked like he was about to say something, but he retreated, moving back to the chair and looking at the television. It was some History Channel documentary on WWII. It looked focused on the concentration camps, which none of the Howling Commandos had much to do with, at least while Steve was with them. He didn’t know what they had ended up doing at the end of the war without him.

“I’m going to jump in the shower and clean up, okay, Buck? If you’re hungry, you can always help yourself to anything.”

Bucky hadn’t moved when Steve came back, changed into the comfortable tan slacks and white shirt he wore around the Tower. They spent the rest of that day in silence, aside from show after show on the History Channel, moving around each other rather than interacting. Steve knew he should try to draw Bucky out, but his mind was still in Brooklyn. It wasn’t exactly a secret where Steve had grown up, but it still shook him to have been dropped off essentially on his front doorstep. The buildings were long changed, his own apartment gone, but that was still his home.

Finally, long after dark, deciding he’d had enough, he rose to make dinner. The food Natasha had stockpiled had begun to run low, necessitating actual cooking. Bucky blocked his way. He didn’t seem aggressive or angry, just intent.

“Is something wrong?” Steve asked.

“You look like you did…” Bucky trailed off, pressing his lips into a thin line, “in the forest. I can’t remember.”

“You’re doing good,” Steve said, catching his shoulder as he went to turn away. “Banner and Stark weren’t sure this would even take. It’s going to take time.”

Bucky didn’t turn back to him. “I’m going to go to bed.”

Steve let him go, sighing. His own appetite gone, he took his time turning off the lights and television, and went to his own room. Bucky had foregone the room Steve had given him and was already lying on his back on Steve’s bed, eyes closed.

He wasn’t sleeping. There was no way he had fallen asleep that quickly, but he didn’t acknowledge Steve’s presence. Steve changed and slid into bed beside him. Bucky’s solid form relaxed gradually when his shoulder pressed against Steve’s back. As relaxed as Bucky got these days.

He’d been like this toward the end of the war, tense and hypervigilant. It hadn’t been this bad, but even then Bucky hadn’t slept well unless he knew all the Commandos were where they were supposed to be, the perimeter secure, and his gun under his pillow. They’d all been a little like that, even Steve, but Bucky was always worse.

Steve drifted off, as comfortable as he ever remembered being, even if the shoulder against his back was no longer warm flesh.


	6. Soldier On

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so long to post, everybody! My life got busy and this last chapter needed a bit of a rewrite. Title comes, again, from my [playlist on spotify](http://open.spotify.com/user/129150009/playlist/1ewF2sYM7mD9b9RoMYplsA). This is the final chapter, but if there's interest I may write some one-shots that take place during and after, like I did with my Hope/Lost verse. Thank you all for reading, loves!

He didn’t know what woke him, just that the sense of the room had changed. It was silent except for breathing and the faint sound of traffic from the street below. It was still dark, so he hadn’t been asleep for that long, and Bucky was still at his side, but he’d gone rigid. Likely that was what had woken him.

“Bucky?”

Bucky shushed him, and that was when Steve heard it. A roaring crash from a few floors below. Steve kicked out of bed, grabbing his shield.

“JARVIS?”

“Please stand by, Captain Rogers.” Long enough passed that Steve was about to disregard JARVIS and head down to investigate, but JARVIS spoke right then. “Miss Romanov and Mr. Stark have everything under control. You may return to bed.”

“What happened?” Steve asked, uncertain if the computer would even tell him.

“There was an incident with Mr. Banner. Everything is under control.”

Steve sighed and eased himself back into bed. He had grown to respect this team, even to care for them, but things like this reminded him that they weren’t his team. Not really. They weren’t his Commandos; they weren’t even his Strike team. They were a broken bunch of misfits thrown together by Fury.

“You’re upset again,” Bucky observed, voice subdued.

“In some ways, things were better during the war,” Steve said. “The bad guys were bad, the good guys were good, and even if we did some terrible things, it was because our worst was better than their worst. Now… Now everything is shades of gray and I don’t always know what’s best. This team — the Avengers — we’re not a real team.”

Bucky sat up, and Steve sat up as well, leaning back against the headboard. It was too dark to see clearly, and the diffused light from around the curtains left Bucky’s face more in shadow than light. Bucky’s right hand reached for Steve and touched his cheek.

Steve let him, watching Bucky with more curiosity than wariness. Bucky leaned forward and, before Steve could begin to figure out what he was doing, kissed him. Steve froze.

Bucky pulled back when Steve tensed, his eyes glinting in the faded light. “Is that wrong?”

“It’s… Bucky, its not…”

“Everything I remember,” Bucky said, drawing his knees up to his chest like a child. “Every memory I have, every image, you’re there. Your face is everywhere. Or-or if not your face, your hands or your back. In alleyways and classrooms and bars. I see you in fields of mud and blood and snow. You found me in a Ukrainian forest. I can’t sleep unless I’m with you. I don’t — I don’t think I feel things the way I’m supposed to, the way I used to, but when you walked in with blood on your face… Something in me…” Bucky gestured toward his chest.

“We weren’t…” Steve had to clear his throat and start again. His mind was racing, spinning, tumbling through the void. “We weren’t that. It wasn’t something you did then.”

“Is it something you do now?” Bucky asked.

Steve hesitated, trying to find the words. Trying to figure out what was slotting together so perfectly in his brain.

Bucky took his hesitation for a negative and moved to get out of the bed, but Steve caught his left arm. Bucky pulled free from Steve’s grip, but he didn’t try to escape. He just stood, body tense for either fight or flight, Steve didn’t know which. His feet were prepared to run, his upper body still turned toward Steve as though to defend himself.

Steve stood. This was wrong. This wasn’t what he was supposed to do. This wasn’t right. Bucky didn’t remember anything. Those brief flashes and mentions of things he couldn’t understand didn’t count. He had lost so much ground when Stark and Banner wiped him, but the Winter Soldier was almost gone. This was Bucky before him, his best friend. The person he had loved since he had begun to understand what love was.

He caught Bucky’s right hand and drew him closer. Bucky came almost unwillingly, step by painful, slow step. When at last they face to face, Steve brought his hand up to touch Bucky’s cheek, brushing his knuckles along his temple.

“We can,” Steve said, wishing for a little more light to see something other than dark shadows where Bucky’s eyes should be. “But your memories — Bucky, I don’t want you to mix up… feeling grateful for something more.”

Bucky closed the distance between them, grabbing Steve almost roughly and kissing him. They stumbled backward together until the back of Steve’s legs hit the bed. They teetered their for a moment, Steve’s hands clenched in the back of the thin shirt Bucky wore, then their momentum carried them over. Steve prepared himself for the heavy weight of Bucky’s body on top of him, but he managed to catch himself on his elbows, barely breaking their kiss.

Steve ran his fingers across the back of Bucky’s neck then, regretfully, pulled away. “Buck, hold on a minute.”

Bucky shuddered, then pulled further away, resting his forehead in the center of Steve’s chest, breathing hard. Steve ran his fingers through Bucky’s hair, then reached down to guide Bucky back up until they were even.

“Come here,” Steve said, taking a moment to kiss him. Bucky settled down on top of him, still supporting himself on his elbows. “Slow, Buck. We need to take it slow. If you remember anything that makes you change your mind, I don’t want anything to have—”

“Steve, shut up.”

Steve laughed. Bucky moved off him, curling at his side and slinging his arm — his right arm, and Steve was going to have to work with him on that. An arm is an arm, skin or metal — over Steve’s chest. Steve caught his hand and twined their fingers together.

Steve expected the next morning to be awkward, for Bucky to have rethought his decision from the previous night, but he woke to Bucky nestled against his side. It was still early, most of the room still in shadow, but some venturous sunbeams had begun to creep through the curtains.

“Good morning,” Bucky said.

“Did you sleep at all?”

Bucky stretched, spine popping as he moved. “Some. More than usual.” He rolled to face Steve, hitching himself up and resting his head on the front of Steve’s shoulder.

Oddly pleased by the fact that Bucky had initiated the contact, Steve pulled Bucky closer, running his fingers over the bare skin low on his hip. Bucky seemed to relax into his touch, letting out a gentle breath.

“Any nightmares?”

Bucky shook his head, dark tendrils of hair tickling Steve’s neck. “Not really.”

‘Not really’ didn’t inspire a lot of confidence, but something in Bucky’s voice told him not to push. He closed his eyes instead, reveling in the presence of the body next to him. Bucky shifted, cold metal soaked through Steve’s thin shirt. He jumped and Bucky immediately pulled back, rolling onto his back so his left arm was facing away.

Steve sat up and reached across Bucky, catching his left hand. Bucky tried to pull away, but Steve held on, tugging until Bucky rolled over to face him again. Steve twined his fingers together with Bucky’s.

“The cold surprised me a little. It’s okay.”

“I used to be real,” Bucky mumbled into his chest. “I used to have all of me.”

Sighing, Steve leaned down and kissed the center of the red star on Bucky’s shoulder. He tensed, but didn’t move. “Bucky, this is you now. You’re not…” He struggled for a moment to find the words. “You’re real. The soldiers who come home from Afghanistan now, are they any less real, if they’ve lost a limb?”

“They had a choice,” Bucky said, voice even softer. “Nobody asked me if I wanted them to drag me out of the ice and give me this… this hunk of metal. I’d rather have died.”

Steve stood up, pulling Bucky to his feet before the other man could protest. He held Bucky tight. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

“We couldn’t’ve done this,” Bucky said, but he didn’t sound very convinced.

Steve nodded anyway, running his fingers through Bucky’s hair. “Do you want to do anything today?”

“Go back to bed?” Bucky guessed. Steve laughed and ruffled Bucky’s hair.

The thin strands of hair in his fingers gave him an idea. “Do you want to get your hair cut today? Nat probably has some contact somewhere in the city who won’t think twice about it.”

Bucky touched the scraggly ends of his hair. “I don’t… I’m not.” He paused to swallow. “I feel like me right now, the one who remembers you small and asthmatic, but I don’t… I’m not safe to be outside the Tower.”

“We can find someone here to do it. Only if you want.”

Bucky fell silent, but finally he nodded, gaze downcast. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Steve said. “Get ready and I’ll make some calls?”

Steve’s first call to Natasha went nowhere, as did the one to Banner, and the one to Barton. Drumming his fingers on the back of the couch, Steve finally thought to call Sam. He kept half an ear out for the sound of Bucky coming out of the shower while the phone rang.

“Somebody had better be dying,” Sam said. “It’s too early, Cap.”

Steve laughed. “I have a favor to ask you.”

“Go ahead.”

Steve explained the situation, about finding Bucky, the time in Ukraine, bringing him back, the wipe, his difficulty remembering who he was, and his concerns about leaving the Tower. When he finally got around to asking Sam what he needed, Sam had an answer immediately.

“I’ve got a friend, Eva, she did a tour in Baghdad, Fallujah… She can handle the Winter Soldier. When do you need us?”

“Whenever you can get here.”

“Forty-five?”

Forty-five minutes later on the dot, someone knocked on the door to Steve’s apartments. Bucky, sitting rigidly on the chair in the corner, jumped at the sound. Steve squeezed his shoulder and went to answer the door.

Sam was lounging against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, deep in conversation with the woman next to him. From Sam’s description, Steve had expected Eva to be tall and broad, but she was barely five feet and narrow, honey-blond hair curling just below her jaw. Her skin was darker than Steve’s own, but not as dark as Sam’s, with a fierce spark of intelligence and strength in her light brown eyes. Dressed in gray jeans and a bright blue shirt, she looked much more like a hairdresser than a soldier.

But she gave him the crispest salute he’d seen in months, and she didn’t blink twice when he introduced her to Bucky. She set straight about directing Bucky to sit on one of the kitchen stools Sam had to drag into the living room.

“All right, Bucky,” Eva said, circling around in front of him, “how much are we cutting off here?”

“I…”

Eva gave him a kind smile and held out a mirror. “I know what we’ll do. I’ll just straighten out the ends, you can take a look, and we can decide if we need to go any further then, yeah? We don’t need to go any further than you want, and because I haven’t quite mastered a way to uncut hair I’ve already started in on, we’ll go slow.”

Bucky had chosen a long-sleeved shirt that day, but he still took the mirror in his right hand, his left hidden at his side. Chattering quietly to Bucky about one thing or another, Eva paid no heed to the metallic glint of Bucky’s hand or the other two men in the room. They settled finally on trimming a few inches, enough to get rid of the ruined ends and to “even it up,” whatever Eva meant by that. Steve thought it looked even enough after her first request that Bucky look at what she’d done.

When she finished, she even managed to vacuum the carpet, all the while refusing Steve and Sam’s attempts to pay her.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Eva said finally, her hands on her hips. “He needed a haircut and it’s obvious he’s not in a state to go out and get it done. I’m not charging to help out. If you want to pay me, see that he gets the help he needs. Don’t let him try to tough it out the way most of his type do. Sam, you getting me home or am I taking a cab?”

Sam made a few unintelligible sounds at her back as she walked away, and then hurried after her, waving at Steve over his shoulder.

Shaking his head, Steve began closing the door and turned, almost running into Bucky. He jerked to a halt, catching his own heel in the door. He grumbled out a curse and moved out of the way.

“You’re as bad as Natasha,” Steve said, rubbing at the ache in his heel.

“I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Steve waved off his apology. “She does it on purpose, so watch out for that when you start dealing with her more often.” Settling both feet back on the floor, he put one hand on the side of Bucky’s face. “You okay?”

Tilting his head to capture Steve’s hand between cheek and shoulder, Bucky nodded. “A little better, even.”

Steve stepped in closer and tilted Bucky’s chin up to kiss him. He pulled back after a moment, smoothing away the frown on Bucky’s face with his fingers. “What?”

“You’re so damn tall.”

Steve snorted and put his arm around Bucky’s waist to lead him back into the living room.

 

Ten Months Later

 

Steve finished the final lines of Falsworth’s face and set his pencil down. He picked up the paper and frowned at it, critical at the false starts where his memory had failed him. The shape of Dernier’s eyes was off just a little and Steve had compared Morita’s smile to a picture so many times it had begun to look forced.

He put the picture down and reached for the pencil again. Maybe if he tried to make the eyes just a little smaller… or maybe bigger…

A gloved hand snatched the picture from the table and held it up. Steve tried to protest, then fell silent, knowing it would make no difference. He turned in his chair to look at Bucky, to gauge his reaction. He looked at the picture for long enough that Steve began to worry and he stood to look at it again. Bucky looked up from the picture and smiled. The expression still didn’t come often enough, but it came more freely now than it had almost a year ago.

“It’s still not quite right,” Steve said, peering at the picture again. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something.”

Bucky shrugged. He slipped his arms around Steve’s waist, resting his forehead against the back of Steve’s neck. “I defer to your judgment.”

“How did your session go today?” Steve asked, reclaiming the picture and setting it down, turning in Bucky’s arms until they were face to face.

“I know you worship the ground Sam walks on, but it’s still weird talking to him about this. No, no, I know. He’s better than the guy SHIELD had me talking to, but he does this very sort of earnest face and then says things like ‘Decide what you’re going to carry and what you’ll lay down’ and ‘Pack some of it away, then, Bucky.’ And it’s all very inspiring, but after the third time he’s said it, it gets a little old.”

Steve laughed softly, kissing the side of Bucky’s throat. “The first time I watched him run a session, that was pretty much what he said.”

Bucky cupped Steve’s face with his right hand. “He did say I should stop wearing the glove all the time.”

Steve caught Bucky’s left wrist, feeling unyielding metal beneath the leather. “He’s right.”

The metal shifted beneath Steve’s hand, gears clicking and metal plates slipping into place. Steve let go of his wrist, but kept one arm around Bucky’s waist. “The things I remember doing… Steve, I killed so many people. I killed our friends.”

“You’re not having as many nightmares,” Steve said, tracing a thumb across Bucky’s cheek bone. “You only woke up a couple of times last night.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, a faint frown etching lines in his face. He stepped out of Steve’s arms and picked up the picture again. “How many more drafts are you going to do? I think you’re starting to fixate on this. I should probably bring it up with Sam.”

“This one can be the last,” Steve said, frowning at the edges of Morita’s lips. “Does it look like you remember?”

The drawing was their last leave together before Bucky fell. They had been in a small Swiss town that looked as though it had escaped the war entirely, although the few men — too old, too young, or too ill to fight — told the true story. They’d been put up in a picturesque farmhouse tended by an old widow and a young bride who was very likely already a young widow.

The Commandos had decided to help the women with some of the upkeep as a thank-you for their patience with their poor German. The picture Steve had drawn was of them trying to patch the roof, Steve, Bucky, and Falsworth up on the roof, tied by the waist to bricks that had been thrown on the other side of the peak. Dum Dum and Jones stood on ladders, passing up tools that Dernier fetched as they called for them. Morita, exempt from strenuous labor due to a minor shoulder injury, laughed at them. They’d all laughed that day. Steve had added Carter, Phillips, and Stark in an upper corner, just so all the faces were there. It seemed fitting.

“I still have the hardest time remembering then,” Bucky said. “The fight with you on the Helicarrier, everything from then on is almost clear, and I remember most of what I did as the Winter Soldier. It’s everything from a few months before I fell to the first time I was activated that is hardest for me to remember.”

“You’ll remember,” Steve said. In an attempt to lighten the mood, he added, “Clint told me the season finale of _Amish Mafia_ is on in ten minutes. Sounds like everyone’s going.”

“Even you?” Bucky teased.

“I will never forgive him for introducing you to television through Amish reality TV,” Steve said, “but if you want to go, I’ll go. I’ve been promising to teach Natasha one of the card games we learned in Germany.”

Bucky leaned in to kiss him, deeply enough that Steve caught a fistful of the back of Bucky’s shirt before he regained control of himself. Bucky pulled back and kissed Steve on the cheek one more time. “That’s Captain America for you. Always sacrificing himself for the good of his team.”

“At least Fury stopped trying to send us on those team building exercises,” Steve said.

“I think blowing up a village in South Africa, even if Tony rebuilt his ‘exact replica, 2.0’ as an apology, was probably the last straw.”

Steve grimaced at the memory. “Okay. Grab something out of the fridge to bring and we’ll go.”

Bruce had begun teaching Bucky to cook, and Bucky had taken to it much more naturally than Steve. He pulled out a vegetarian lasagna he had cooked the night before and shoved it into Steve’s hands. Steve raised his eyebrows. “Your hands broken, soldier?”

Bucky lifted his left hand, still covered by black leather. “I’m delicate, Cap. And if you keep calling me ‘soldier,’ we’re going to miss _Amish Mafia_.”

“Awful sure about yourself,” Steve said, not bothering to put his shoes on for the short trip to Clint’s quarters. He waited for Bucky to open the door and followed him through that horrible entryway, now with red soviet stars on everything not already covered in the red, white, and blue, toward the elevator and Clint’s apartments.

“Do you doubt me?” Bucky asked. “Never had any complaints before.”

Steve opened the door to Clint’s apartment with his elbow, shoving it open with his shoulder. Clint’s entryway was decorated with bow and arrows painted on every available space and a number of small stuffed toys Natasha had informed him were called ‘plushies’ of a character named Legolas. _Lord of the Rings_ was somewhere in his notebooks, but Steve hadn’t quite gotten around to reading it yet. Or watching all twelve hours of the movies, because Sam insisted it wasn’t worth it to watch the theatrical releases.

They were greeted by loud, cheerful hubbub. Pepper and Maria Hill were passing out glasses of wine while Tony poured glasses of an amber liquid Steve was sure cost more than some people made in months. Natasha greeted them both with a kiss on the cheek and accepted the lasagna, announcing to everyone it was there.

The television was already on in the living room, tuned to some show Steve had only ever seen the last five minutes of. A crumpled paper ball flew past his head, and he heard Sam laughing triumphantly.

“Told you you couldn’t get it!”

“A paper ball is not the same as a bow!” Clint protested, rising from where he’d been crouching behind the half-wall between his living room and kitchen. “I call a redo.”

Bucky squeezed Steve’s hand and waded into the fray, demanding Clint give over one of his paper balls and he would make a better shot. Their debate devolved into “shooting a gun is not the same as shooting arrows” and “I’m still a better shot than you are.”

Jane Foster breezed out of the back hallway and hugged Steve in greeting. “Thor will be here soon. He had to deal with something—” There was a great crack of thunder and lightning flashed outside the tower. “Oh, here he is.”

Thor boomed through the door a few seconds later, sweeping Jane into a hug and presenting Coulson with a huge set of antlers. “A gift for the son of Coul for returning from the dead. It took me some time to find antlers of appropriate girth for one such as you.” Coulson laughed, but nobody else seemed to have any idea what Thor was talking about.

Steve eased himself away from the noise, finding a quiet corner of the living room in which to watch. Bruce found him a few moments later, joining him in the relative quiet.

“Overwhelming?” Bruce asked, fiddling with his shirt cuffs.

Steve shrugged, watching Bucky exchange pointers with Natasha and Clint over the best way to properly crumple and throw a piece of paper. He was just glad Clint hadn’t been doing paper airplanes when they walked in. Bucky was unbeatable at paper airplanes.

“Not overwhelming. It’s good to see him interacting again. For so long I was afraid he wouldn’t talk to anyone but you and me, but then Clint started to draw him out. He was good for Bucky, I think. He and Nat both. If anyone knows what he’s gone through, they would be more able than me to sympathize.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Bruce advised.

The TV cut to credits and Clint and Bucky immediately abandoned their paper ball projectiles and vaulted over the couch, only to find that Tony had already beaten them there. Steve rolled his eyes, Bruce laughed, and they followed the flow of people into the living room.

Clint clapped his hands and the lights flicked off. Steve settled himself in front of the couch at Bucky’s feet, feeling his metal hand rest on Steve’s shoulder. As Natasha nudged Clint aside and perched on the arm of the couch, the woman’s voice on the television announced, “Yes, there is an Amish Mafia.”


End file.
